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ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. i6mo, gilt top, 

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A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected 
by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside Library 
for Young People. i6mo, 75 cents; Holiday 
Edition, i6mo, fancy binding, $1.25. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York. 



ESSAYS IN IDLENESS 



AGNES REPPLIER 




^ 



(VFCO 



^ 



|V SEP 21 1893 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPA1 
Ei)t JSitof rs'ioe press, CamfcriOoe 
1893 









75 zL1(> 

■E.7 



Copyright, 1893, 
By AGNES REPPLIER. 

^li/ n#/ite reserved. 



/Z- 3 £02 J 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 3fass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 




To AGNES IRWIN. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Agrippina 1 

The Children's Poets 33 

The Praises of War 65 

Leisure 94 

Words 113 

Ennui 137 

Wit and Humor . 168 

Letters 192 

"Leisure" is reprinted from "Scribner's Magazine" by 
permission of the publishers. 



ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 



AGRIPPINA. 



She is sitting now on my desk, and I glance 
at her with deference, mutely begging per- 
mission to begin. But her back is turned to 
me, and expresses in every curve such fine 
and delicate disdain that I falter and lose cour- 
age at the very threshold of my task. I have 
long known that cats are the most contemptu- 
ous of creatures, and that Agrippina is the 
most contemptuous of cats. The spirit of Bou- 
haki, the proud Theban beast that sat erect, 
with gold earrings in his ears, at the feet of 
his master, King Hana ; the spirit of Muezza, 
whose slumbers Mahomet himself was not bold 
enough to disturb ; the spirit of Micetto, Cha- 
teaubriand's ecclesiastical pet, dignified as a 
cardinal, and conscious ever that he was the 
gift of a sovereign pontiff, — the spirits of all 



2 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

arrogant cats that have played scornful parts in 
the world's great comedy look out from Agrip- 
pina's yellow eyes, and hold me in subjection. 
I should like to explain to her, if I dared, 
that my desk is small, littered with many 
papers, and sadly overcrowded with the useful 
inutilities which affectionate friends delight in 
giving me at Christmas time. Sainte-Beuve's 
cat, I am aware, sat on his desk, and roamed 
at will among those precious manuscripts 
which no intrusive hand was ever permitted to 
touch ; but Sainte-Beuve probably had suffi- 
cient space reserved for his own comfort and 
convenience. I have not; and Agrippina's 
beautifully ringed tail flapping across my copy 
distracts my attention, and imperils the neat- 
ness of my penmanship. Even when she is 
disposed to be affable, turns the light of her 
countenance upon me, watches with attentive 
curiosity every stroke I make, and softly, with 
curved paw, pats my pen as it travels over the 
paper, — even in these halcyon moments, 
though my self-love is flattered by her conde- 
scension, I am aware that I should work bet- 
ter and more rapidly if I denied myself this 
charming companionship. 



AGR1PPIXA. 3 

But in truth it is impossible for a lover of 
cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discrimi- 
nating little friends, who give us just enough 
of their regard and complaisance to make us 
hunger for more. M. Fee, the naturalist, who 
has written so admirably about animals, and 
who understands, as only a Frenchman can 
understand, the delicate and subtle organiza- 
tion of a cat, frankly admits that the keynote 
of its character is independence. It dwells 
under our roof, sleeps by our fire, endures our 
blandishments, and apparently enjoys our so- 
ciety, without for one moment forfeiting its 
sense of absolute freedom, without acknow- 
ledging any servile relation to the human crea- 
ture who shelters it. " The cat," says M. Fee, 
" will never part with its liberty ; it will 
neither be our servant, like the horse, nor our 
friend, like the dog. It consents to live as our 
guest; it accepts the home we offer and the 
food w^e give ; it even goes so far as to solicit 
our caresses, but capriciously, and when it suits 
its humor to receive them." 

Rude and masterful souls resent this fine 
self-sufficiency in a domestic animal, and re- 
quire that it should have no will but theirs, 



4 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

no pleasure that does not emanate from them. 
They are forever prating of the love and fidel- 
ity of the dog, of the beast that obeys their 
slightest word, crouches contentedly for hours 
at their feet, is exuberantly grateful for the 
smallest attention, and so affectionate that its 
demonstrations require to be curbed rather 
than encouraged. All this homage is pleasing 
to their vanity ; yet there are people, less ma- 
gisterial perhaps, or less exacting, who believe 
that true friendship, even with an animal, may 
be built upon mutual esteem and independence ; 
that to demand gratitude is to be unworthy of 
it ; and that obedience is not essential to agree- 
able and healthy intercourse. A man who 
owns a dog is, in every sense of the word, its 
master ; the term expresses accurately their 
mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when 
applied to the limited possession of a cat. I 
am certainly not Agrippina's mistress, and the 
assumption of authority on my part would be 
a mere empty dignity, like those swelling titles 
which afford such innocent delight to the 
Freemasons of our severe republic. If I call 
Agrippina, she does not come ; if I tell her to 
go away, she remains where she is; if I try to 



AGRIPPINA. 5 

persuade her to show off her one or two little 
accomplishments, she refuses, with courteous 
but unswerving decision. She has frolicsome 
moods, in which a thimble, a shoe-buttoner, a 
scrap of paper, or a piece of string will drive 
her wild with delight ; she has moods of inflexi- 
ble gravity, in which she stares solemnly at her 
favorite ball rolling over the carpet, without 
stirring one lazy limb to reach it. " Have I 
seen this foolish toy before ? " she seems to be 
asking herself with musing austerity ; " and 
can it be possible that there are cats who run 
after such frivolous trifles? Vanity of vani- 
ties, and all is vanity, save only to lie upon 
the hearth-rug, and be warm, and ' think grave 
thoughts to feed a serious soul.' " In such 
moments of rejection and humiliation, I com- 
fort myself by recalling the words of one 
too wise for arrogance. " When I play with 
my cat," says Montaigne, " how do I know 
whether she does not make a jest of me ? We 
entertain each other with mutual antics ; and 
if I have my own time for beginning or refus- 
ing, she too has hers." 

This is the spirit in which we should ap- 
proach a creature so reserved and so utterly 



6 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

self-sufficing ; this is the only key we have to 
that natural distinction of character which re- 
pels careless and unobservant natures. When 
I am told that Agrippina is disobedient, un- 
grateful, cold-hearted, perverse, stupid, treach- 
erous, and cruel, I no longer strive to check 
the torrent of abuse. I know that Buffon said 
all this, and much more, about cats, and that 
people have gone on repeating it ever since, 
principally because these spirited little beasts 
have remained just what it pleased Providence 
to make them, have preserved their primitive 
freedom through centuries of effete and demor- 
alizing civilization. Why, I wonder, should a 
great many good men and women cherish an 
unreasonable grudge against one animal be- 
cause it does not chance to possess the precise 
qualities of another ? " My dog fetches my 
slippers for me every night," said a friend 
triumphantly, not long ago. " He puts them 
first to warm by the fire, and then brings them 
over to my chair, wagging his tail, and as 
proud as Punch. Would your cat do as much 
for you, I 'd like to know ? " Assuredly not ! 
If I waited for Agrippina to fetch me shoes or 
slippers, I should have no other resource save 



AGRIPPINA. 7 

to join as speedily as possible one of the bare- 
footed religious orders of Italy. But, after all, 
fetching slippers is not the whole duty of do- 
mestic pets. As La Fontaine gently reminds 

us : — 

" Tout animal n'a pas toutes propridt^s." 

We pick no quarrel with a canary because it 
does not talk like a parrot, nor with a parrot 
because it does not sing like a canary. We 
find no fault with a King Charles spaniel for 
not flying at the throat of a burglar, nor with 
a St. Bernard because we cannot put it in our 
pocket. Agrippina will never make herself 
serviceable, yet nevertheless is she of inestima- 
ble service. How many times have I rested 
tired eyes on her graceful little body, curled 
up in a ball and wrapped round with her tail 
like a parcel ; or stretched out luxuriously on 
my bed, one paw coyly covering her face, the 
other curved gently inwards, as though clasp- 
ing an invisible treasure ! Asleep or awake, 
in rest or in motion, grave or gay, Agrippina 
is always beautiful; and it is better to be 
beautiful than to fetch and carry from the 
rising to the setting of the sun. She is droll, 
too, with an unconscious humor, even in her 



8 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

most serious and sentimental moods. She has 
quite the longest ears that ever were seen on so 
small a cat, eyes more solemn than Athene's 
owl blinking in the sunlight, and an air of 
supercilious disdain that would have made 
Diogenes seem young and ardent by her side. 
Sitting on the library table, under the evening 
lamp, with her head held high in air, her tall 
ears as erect as chimneys, and her inscrutable 
gaze fixed on the darkest corner of the room, 
Agrippina inspires in the family sentiments of 
mingled mirthfulness and awe. To laugh at 
her in such moments, however, is to incur her 
supreme displeasure. I have known her to 
jump down from the table, and walk haugh- 
tily out of the room, because of a single half- 
suppressed but wholly indecorous giggle. 

Schopenhauer has said that the reason do- 
mestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to 
us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, 
the present moment. Life holds no future for 
them, and consequently no care ; if they are 
content, their contentment is absolute ; and 
our jaded and wearied spirits find a natural 
relief in the sight of creatures whose little cups 
of happiness can so easily be filled to the brim. 



AGRIPPINA. 9 

Walt Whitman expresses the same thought 
more coarsely when he acknowledges that he 
loves the society of animals because they do 
not sweat and whine over their condition, nor 
lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 
nor sicken him with discussions of their duty. 
In truth, that admirable counsel of Sydney 
Smith's, " Take short views of life," can be 
obeyed only by the brutes ; for the thought 
that travels even to the morrow is long enough 
to destroy our peace of mind, inasmuch as we 
know not what the morrow may bring forth. 
But when Agrippina has breakfasted, and 
washed, and sits in the sunlight blinking at 
me with affectionate contempt, I feel soothed 
by her absolute and unqualified enjoyment. I 
know how full my day will be of things that I 
don't want particularly to do, and that are not 
particularly worth doing ; but for her, time 
and the world hold only this brief moment of 
contentment. Slowly the eyes close, gently 
the little body is relaxed. Oh, you who strive 
to relieve your overwrought nerves, and cul- 
tivate power through repose, watch the ex- 
quisite languor of a drowsy cat, and despair 
of imitating such perfect and restful grace! 



10 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

There is a gradual yielding of every muscle to 
the soft persuasiveness of slumber ; the flexi- 
ble frame is curved into tender lines, the head 
nestles lower, the paws are tucked out of sight ; 
no convulsive throb or start betrays a rebel- 
lious alertness; only a faint quiver of uncon- 
scious satisfaction, a faint heaving of the tawny 
sides, a faint gleam of the half-shut yellow 
eyes, and Agrippina is asleep. I look at her 
for one wistful .moment, and then turn reso- 
lutely to my work. It were ignoble to wish 
myself in her place, and yet how charming to 
be able to settle down to a nap, sans peur et 
sans reproche, at ten o'clock in the morning ! 

These, then, are a few of the pleasures to be 
derived from the society of an amiable cat ; 
and by an amiable cat I mean one that, while 
maintaining its own dignity and delicate re- 
serve, is nevertheless affable and condescend- 
ing in the company of human beings. There 
is nothing I dislike more than newspaper and 
magazine stories about priggish pussies — like 
the children in Sunday-school books — that 
share their food with hungry beasts from the 
back alleys, and show touching fidelity to old 
blind masters, and hunt partridges, in a spirit 



AGRIPPINA. 11 

of noble self-sacrifice, for consumptive mis- 
tresses, and scorn to help themselves to delica- 
cies from the kitchen tables, and arouse their 
households so often in cases of fire that I 
should suspect them of starting the conflagra- 
tions in order to win applause by giving the 
alarm. Whatever a real cat may or may not 
be, it is never a prig, and all true lovers of the 
race have been quick to recognize and appre- 
ciate this fact. 

" I value in the cat," says Chateaubriand, 
" that independent and almost ungrateful tem- 
per which prevents it from attaching itself to 
any one ; the indifference with which it passes 
from the salon to the housetop. When you 
caress it, it stretches itself out and arches its 
back responsively ; but that is caused by phy- 
sical pleasure, and not, as in the case of the 
dog, by a silly satisfaction in loving and being 
faithful to a master who returns thanks in 
kicks. The cat lives alone, has no need of 
society, does not obey except when it likes, pre- 
tends to sleep that it may see the more clearly, 
and scratches everything that it can scratch." 

Here is a sketch spirited enough, and of good 
outline, but hardly correct in detail. A cat 



12 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

seldom manifests affection, yet is often dis- 
tinctly social, and likes to see itself the petted 
minion of a family group. Agrippina, in fact, 
so far from living alone, will not, if slie can 
help it, remain for a moment in a room by her- 
self. She is content to have me as a compan- 
ion, perhaps in default of better; but if I 
go upstairs or downstairs in search of a book, 
or my eyeglasses, or any one of the countless 
things that are never where they ought to be, 
Agrippina follows closely at my heels. Some- 
times, when she is fast asleep, I steal softly 
out of the door, thinking to escape her vigi- 
lance ; but before I have taken a dozen steps 
she is under my feet, niewing a gentle re- 
proach, and putting on all the injured airs of 
a deserted Ariadne. I should like to think 
such behavior prompted by affection rather 
than by curiosity ; but in my candid moments 
I find this " pathetic fallacy " a difficult sen- 
timent to cherish. There are people, I am 
aware, who trustfully assert that their pets 
love them; and one such sanguine creature 
has recently assured the wprld that " no man 
who boasts the real intimacy and confidence 
of a cat would dream of calling his four-footed 



AGRIPPINA. 13 

friend ' puss. ' But is not such a boast 
rather ill-timed at best ? How dare any man 
venture to assert that he possesses the intimacy 
and confidence of an animal so exclusive and 
so reserved ? I doubt if Cardinal Wolsey, in 
the zenith of his pride and power, claimed the 
intimacy and confidence of the superb cat who 
sat in a cushioned armchair by his side, and 
reflected with mimic dignity the full-blown 
honors of the Lord High Chancellor of Eng- 
land. Agrippina, I am humbly aware, grants 
me neither her intimacy nor her confidence, 
but only her companionship, which I endeavor 
to receive modestly, and without flaunting my 
favors to the world. She is displeased and 
even downcast when I go out, and she greets 
my return with delight, thrusting her little 
gray head between the banisters the instant 
I open the house door, and waving a welcome 
in mid-air with one ridiculously small paw. 
Being but mortal, I am naturally pleased with 
these tokens of esteem, but I do not, on that 
account, go about with arrogant brow, and 
boast of my intimacy with Agrippina, I 
should be laughed at, if I did, by everybody 
who is privileged to possess and appreciate a 
cat. 



14 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

As for curiosity, that vice which the Abbe 
Galiani held to be unknown to animals, but 
which the more astute Voltaire detected in 
every little dog that he saw peering out of the 
window of its master's coach, it is the ruling 
passion of the feline breast. A closet door left 
ajar, a box with half -closed lid, an open bureau 
drawer, — these are the objects that fill a cat 
with the liveliest interest and delight. Agrip- 
pina watches breathlessly the unfastening of 
a parcel, and tries to hasten matters by clutch- 
ing actively at the string. When its contents 
are shown her, she examines them gravely, 
and then, with a sigh of relief , settles down to 
repose. The slightest noise disturbs and irri- 
tates her until she discovers its cause. If she 
hears a footstep in the hall, she runs out to 
see whose it is, and, like certain troublesome 
little people I have known, she dearly loves 
to go to the front door every time the bell 
is rung. From my window she surveys the 
street with tranquil scrutiny, and, if boys are 
playing below, she follows their games with a 
steady, scornful stare, very different from the 
wistful eagerness of a friendly dog, quiver- 
ing to join in the sport. Sometimes the boys 



AGRIPPINA. 15 

catch sight of her, and shout up rudely at her 
window ; and I can never sufficiently admire 
Agrippina's conduct upon these trying occa- 
sions, the well-bred composure with which she 
affects neither to see nor to hear them, nor 
to be aware that there are such objectionable 
creatures as children in the world. Some- 
times, too, the terrier that lives next door 
comes out to sun himself in the street, and, 
beholding my cat sitting well out of reach, he 
dances madly up and down the pavement, 
barking with all his might, and rearing him- 
self on his short hind legs, in a futile attempt 
to dislodge her. Then the spirit of evil 
enters Agrippina's little heart. The win- 
dow is open, and she creeps to the extreme 
edge of the stone sill, stretches herself at full 
length, peers down smilingly at the frenzied 
dog, dangles one paw enticingly in the air, 
and exerts herself with quiet malice to drive 
him to desperation. Her sense of humor is 
awakened by his frantic efforts, and by her 
own absolute security ; and not until he is 
spent with exertion, and lies panting and 
exhausted on the bricks, does she arch her 
graceful back, stretch her limbs lazily in the 



16 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

sun, and with one light bound spring from the 
window to my desk. Wisely has Moncrif 
observed that a eat is not merely diverted by 
everything that moves, but is convinced that 
all nature is occupied exclusively with cater- 
ing to her diversion. 

There is a charming story told by M. 
Champfleury, who has written so much and so 
admirably about cats, of a poor hermit whose 
piety and asceticism were so great that in a 
vision he was permitted to behold his place 
in heaven, next to that of St. Gregory, the 
sovereign pontiff of Christendom. The her- 
mit, who possessed nothing upon earth but a 
female cat, was abashed by the thought that in 
the next world he was destined to rank with 
so powerful a prince of the Church ; and per- 
haps — for who knows the secret springs of 
spiritual pride ? — he fancied that his self- 
inflicted poverty would win for him an even 
higher reward. Whereupon a second revela- 
tion made known to him that his detachment 
from the world was by no means so complete 
as he imagined, for that he loved and valued 
his cat, the sole companion of his solitude, 
more than St. Gregory loved and valued all 



AGRIPPINA. 17 

his earthly possessions. The Pope on his 
throne was the truer ascetic of the two. 

This little tale conveys to us, in addition 
to its excellent moral, — never more needed 
than at present, — a pleasing truth concern- 
ing the lovability of cats. While they have 
never attained, and never deserve to attain, 
the widespread and somewhat commonplace 
popularity of dogs, their fascination is a 
more potent and irresistible charm. He 
who yields himself to the sweet seductiveness 
of a cat is beguiled forever from the simple, 
honorable friendship of the more generous 
and open-hearted beast. The small domestic 
sphinx whose inscrutable eyes never soften 
with affection ; the fetich animal that comes 
down to us from the far past, adored, hated, 
and feared, — a god in wise and silent Egypt, 
a plaything in old Rome, a hunted and un- 
holy creature, suffering one long martyrdom 
throughout the half-seen, dimly-fathomed Mid- 
dle Ages, — even now this lovely, uncanny 
pet is capable of inspiring mingled sentiments 
of horror and devotion. Those who are under 
its spell rejoice in their thralldom, and, like 
M. Champfleury's hermit, grow strangely wed- 



18 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

ded to this mute, unsympathetic comradeship. 
Those who have inherited the old, half-fear- 
ful aversion render a still finer tribute to the 
cat's native witchery and power. I have seen 
middle-aged women, of dignified and tranquil 
aspect, draw back with unfeigned dismay at 
the sight of Agrippina, a little ball of gray 
and yellow fur, curled up in peaceful slum- 
ber on the hearth rug. And this instinctive 
shrinking has nothing in common with the 
perfectly reasonable fear we entertain for a 
terrier snapping and snarling at our heels, 
or for a mastiff the size of a calf, which our 
friend assures us is as gentle as a baby, but 
which looks able and ready to tear us limb 
from limb. It may be ignominious to be 
afraid of dogs, but the emotion is one which 
will bear analysis and explanation ; we know 
exactly what it is we fear ; while the uneasi- 
ness with which many people behold a harm- 
less and perfectly indifferent cat is a faint 
reflection of that superstitious terror which 
the nineteenth century still borrows occasion- 
ally from the ninth. We call it by a differ- 
ent name, and account for it on purely natural 
principles, in deference to progress ; but the 



AGRIPFINA. 19 

Mediaeval peasant who beheld his cat steal 
out, like a gray shadow, on St. John's Eve, to 
join in unholy rites, felt the same shuddering 
abhorrence which we witness and wonder at 
to-day. He simplified matters somewhat, and 
eased his troubled mind by killing the beast ; 
for cats that ventured forth on the feast of 
St. John, or on Halloween, or on the second 
Wednesday in Lent, did so at their peril. 
Fires blazed for them in every village, and 
even quiet stay-at-homes were too often hunted 
from their chimney-corners to a cruel death. 
There is a receipt signed in 1575 by one 
Lucas Pommoreux, — abhorred forever be his 
name ! — to whom has been paid the sum of a 
hundred sols parisis " for having supplied for 
three years all the cats required for the fire on 
St. John's Day ; " and be it remembered that 
the gracious child, afterwards Louis XIII., 
interceded with Henry IV. for the lives of 
these poor animals, sacrificed to wicked sport 
and an unreasoning terror. 

Girt around with fear, and mystery, and sub- 
tle associations of evil, the cat comes down to 
us through the centuries ; and from every land 
fresh traditions of sorcery claim it for their 



20 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

own. In Brittany is still whispered the dread- 
ful tale of the cats that danced with sacrile- 
gious glee around the crucifix until their king 
was slain; and in Sicily men know that if 
a black cat serves seven masters in turn he 
carries the soul of the seventh into hell. In 
Kussia black cats become devils at the end of 
seven years, and in southern Europe they are 
merely serving their apprenticeship as witches. 
Norwegian folk-lore is rich in ghastly stories 
like that of the wealthy miller whose mill has 
been twice burned down on Whitsun night, 
and for whom a traveling tailor offers to keep 
watch. The tailor chalks a circle on the floor, 
writes the Lord's prayer around it, and waits 
until midnight, when a troop of cats rush in, 
and hang a great pot of pitch over the fire- 
place. Again and again they try to overturn 
this pitch, but every time the tailor frightens 
them away ; and when their leader endeavors 
stealthily to draw him outside of his magic 
circle, he cuts off her paw with his knife. 
Then they all fly howling into the night, and 
the next morning the miller sees with joy his 
mill standing whole and unharmed. But the 
miller's wife cowers under the bedclothes, of- 



AGRIPPINA. 21 

fering her left hand to the tailor, and hid- 
ing as best she can her right arm's bleeding 
stump. 

Finer even than this tale is the well-known 
story which " Monk " Lewis told to Shelley of 
a gentleman who, late one night, went to visit 
a friend living on the outskirts of a forest in 
east Germany. He lost his path, and, after 
wandering aimlessly for some time, beheld at 
last a light streaming from the windows of an 
old and ruined abbey. Looking in, he saw a 
procession of cats lowering into the grave a 
small coffin with a crown upon it. The sight 
filled him with horror, and, spurring his horse, 
he rode away as fast as he could, never stop- 
ping until he reached Ms destination, long 
after midnight. His friend was still await- 
ing him, and at once he recounted what had 
happened ; whereupon a cat that lay sleeping 
by the fire sprang to its feet, cried out, " Then 
I am the King of the Cats ! " and disappeared 
like a flash up the chimney. 

For my part, I consider this the best cat 
story in all literature, full of suggestiveness 
and terror, yet picturesque withal, and leaving 
ample room in the mind for speculation. Why 



22 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

was not the heir apparent bidden to the royal 
funeral? Was there a disputed succession, 
and how are such points settled in the myste- 
rious domain of cat-land? The notion that 
these animals gather in ghost-haunted churches 
and castles for their nocturnal revels is one 
common to all parts of Europe. We remem- 
ber how the little maiden of the " Mountain 
Idyl " confides to Heine that the innocent-look- 
ing cat in the chimney-corner is really a witch, 
and that at midnight, when the storm is high, 
she steals away to the ruined keep, where the 
spirits of the dead wait spellbound for the 
word that shall waken them. In all scenes 
of impish revelry cats play a prominent part, 
although occasionally, by virtue of their dual 
natures, they serve as barriers against the 
powers of evil. There is the old story of the 
witch's cat that was grateful to the good girl 
who gave it some ham to eat, — I may observe 
here, parenthetically, that I have never known 
a cat that would touch ham, — and there is the 
fine bit of Italian folk-lore about the servant 
maid who, with no other protector than a black 
cat, ventures to disturb a procession of ghosts 
on the dreadful Night of the Dead. " It is 



AGRIPPINA. 23 

well for you that the cat lies in your arms," 
the angry spirit says to her ; " otherwise what 
I am, you also would be." The last pale reflex 
of a universal tradition I found three years 
ago in London, where the bad behavior of the 
Westminster cats — proverbially the most dis- 
solute and profligate specimens of their race — 
has given rise to the pleasant legend of a coun- 
try house whither these rakish animals retire 
for nights of gay festivity, and whence they 
return in the early morning, jaded, repentant, 
and forlorn. 

Of late years there has been a rapid and 
promising growth of what disaffected and al- 
literative critics call the " cat cult," and poets 
and painters vie with one another in celebrat- 
ing the charms of this long-neglected pet. 
Mr. M. H. Spielmann's beautiful volume in 
praise of Madame Henriette Ronner and her 
pictures is a treasure upon which many an ar- 
dent lover of cats will cast wandering and wist- 
ful glances. It is impossible for even the most 
disciplined spirit not to yearn over these little 
furry darlings, these gentle, mischievous, lazy, 
irresistible things. As for Banjo, that dear 
and sentimental kitten, with his head on one 



24 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

side like Lydia Languish, and a decorous 
melancholy suffusing his splendid eyes, let any 
obdurate scorner of the race look at his loveli- 
ness and be converted. Mrs. Graham R. Tom- 
son's pretty anthology, " Concerning Cats," 
is another step in the right direction ; a dainty 
volume of selections from Erench and English 
verse, where we may find old favorites like 
Cowper's " Retired Cat " and Calverly's " Sad 
Memories," graceful epitaphs on departed pus- 
sies, some delightful poems from Baudelaire, 
and three, no less delightful, from the pen of 
Mrs. Tomson herself, whose preface, or " fore- 
word," is enough to win for her at once the 
friendship and sympathy of the elect. The 
book, while it contains a good deal that might 
well have been omitted, is necessarily a small 
one ; for poets, English poets especially, have 
just begun to sing the praises of the cat, as 
they have for generations sung the praises of 
the horse and dog. Nevertheless, all English 
literature, and all the literatures of every land, 
are full of charming allusions to this friendly 
animal, — allusions the brevity of which only 
enhances their value. Those two delicious 
lines of Herrick's, for example, — 



AG HIPP IN A. 25 

" And the brisk mouse may feast herself with crumbs, 
Till that the green-eyed kitling comes," — 

are worth the whole of Wordsworth's solemn 
poem, " The Kitten and the Falling Leaves." 
What did Wordsworth know of the innate 
vanity, the affectation and coquetry, of kitten- 
hood ? He saw the little beast gamboling on 
the wall, and he fancied her as innocent as she 
looked, — as though any living creature could 
be as innocent as a kitten looks ! With touch- 
ing simplicity, he believed her all unconscious 
of the admiration she was exciting : — 

" What would little Tabby care 
For the plaudits of the crowd ? 
Over happy to be proud, 
Over wealthy in the treasure 
Of her own exceeding pleasure ! ' ' 

Ah, the arrant knavery of that kitten ! The 
tiny impostor, showing off her best tricks, and 
feigning to be occupied exclusively with her 
own infantile diversion ! We can see her now, 
prancing and paddling after the leaves, and 
all the while peeping out of " the tail o' her 
ee" at the serene poet and philosopher, and 
waving her naughty tail in glee over his con- 
fidence and condescension. 



26 JESS AYS IN IDLENESS. 

Heine's pretty lines, — 

" And close beside me the cat sits purring 1 , 
Warming her paws at the cheery gleam ; 
The flames keep flitting, and flicking, and whirring ; 
My mind is wrapped in a realm of dream," — 

find their English echo in the letter Shelley 
writes to Peacock, describing, half wistfully, 
the shrines of the Penates, "whose hymns 
are the purring of kittens, the hissing of ket- 
tles, 4 the long talks over the past and dead, the 
laugh of children, the warm wind of summer 
filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm 
of winter struggling in vain for entrance." 
How incomplete would these pictures be, how 
incomplete is any fireside sketch, without the 
purring kitten or drowsy cat ! 

' ' The queen I am o' that cozy place ; 
As wi' ilka paw I dicht my face, 
I sing an' purr wi' mickle grace." 

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little 
god of domesticity, whose presence turns a 
house into a home. Even the chilly desolation 
of a hotel may be rendered endurable by these 
affable and discriminating creatures ; for one 
of them, as we know, once welcomed Sir Wal- 
ter Scott, and softened for him the unfamiliar 



AGRIPPINA. 27 

and unloved surroundings. " There are no 
dogs in the hotel where I lodge," he writes to 
Abbotsford from London, " but a tolerably 
conversable cat who eats a mess of cream with 
me in the morning." Of course it did, the 
wise and lynx-eyed beast ! I make no doubt 
that, day after day and week after week, that 
cat had wandered superbly amid the common 
throng of lodgers, showing favor to none, and 
growing cynical and disillusioned by constant 
contact with a crowd. Then, one morning, it 
spied the noble, rugged face which neither man 
nor beast could look upon without loving, and 
forthwith tendered its allegiance on the spot. 
Only " tolerably conversable " it was, this 
reserved and town-bred animal; less urbane 
because less happy than the much-respected 
retainer at Abbotsford, Master Hinse of Hinse- 
feld, whom Sir Walter called his friend. " Ah, 
mon grand ami, vous avez tue mon autre grand 
ami ! " he sighed, when the huge hound Nim- 
rod ended poor Hinse' s placid career. And if 
Scott sometimes seems to disparage cats, as 
when he unkindly compares Oliver-le-Dain to 
one, in " Quentin Durward," he atones for 
such indignity by the use of the little pronoun 



28 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

" who " when writing of the London puss. 
My own habit is to say " who " on similar 
occasions, and I am glad to have so excellent 
an authority. 

It were an endless though a pleasant task to 
recount all that has been said, and well said, 
in praise of the cat by those who have rightly 
valued her companionship. M. Loti's Mou- 
moutte Blanche and Moumoutte Chinoise 
are well known and widely beloved, and M. 
Theophile Gautier's charming pages are too 
familiar for comment. Who has not read with 
delight of the Black and White Dynasties 
that for so long ruled with gentle sway over 
his hearth and heart ; of Madame Theophile, 
who thought the parrot was a green chicken ; 
of Don Pierrot de Navarre, who deeply resented 
his master's staying out late at night ; of the 
graceful and fastidious Seraphita ; the glut- 
tonous Enjolras ; the acute Bohemian, Ga- 
vroche ; the courteous and well-mannered Epo- 
nine, who received M. Gautier's guests in the 
drawing-room and dined at his table, taking 
each course as it was served, and restraining 
any rude distaste for food not to her fancy. 
" Her place was laid without a knife and fork, 



AGRIPPINA. 29 

indeed, but with a glass, and she went regu- 
larly through dinner, from soup to dessert, 
awaiting her turn to be helped, and behaving 
with a quiet propriety which most children 
might imitate with advantage. At the first 
stroke of the bell she would appear, and when 
I came into the dining-room she would be at 
her post, upright on her chair, her f orepaws on 
the edge of the tablecloth ; and she would pre- 
sent her smooth forehead to be kissed, like a 
well-bred little girl who was affectionately po- 
lite to relatives and old people." 

I have read this pretty description several 
times to Agrippina, who is extremely wayward 
and capricious about her food, rejecting plain- 
tively one day the viands which she has eaten 
with apparent enjoyment the day before. In 
fact, the difficulty of catering to her is so well 
understood by tradesmen that recently, when 
the housemaid carried her on an errand to the 
grocery, — Agrippina is very fond of these 
jaunts and of the admiration she excites, — 
the grocer, a fatherly man, with cats of his 
own, said briskly, " Is this the little lady who 
eats the biscuits ? " and presented her on the 
spot with several choice varieties from which 



30 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

to choose. She is fastidious, too, about the 
way in which her meals are served ; disliking 
any other dishes than her own, which are of 
blue-and-white china ; requiring that her meat 
should be cut up fine and all the fat removed, 
and that her morning oatmeal should be well 
sugared and creamed. Milk she holds in scorn. 
My friends tell me sometimes that it is not 
the common custom of cats to receive so much 
attention at table, and that it is my fault 
Agrippina is so exacting ; but such grumblers 
fail to take into consideration the marked in- 
dividuality that is the charm of every kindly 
treated puss. She differs from her sisters as 
widely as one woman differs from another, 
and reveals varying characteristics of good and 
evil, varying powers of intelligence and adap- 
tation. She scales splendid heights of virtue, 
and, unlike Sir Thomas Browne, is " singular 
in offenses." Even those primitive instincts 
which we believe all animals hold in common 
are lost in acquired ethics and depravity. No 
heroism could surpass that of the London cat 
who crawled back five times under the stage 
of the burning theatre to rescue her litter of 
kittens, and, having carried four of them to 



AGRIPPINA. 31 

safety, perished devotedly with the fifth. On 
the other hand, I know of a cat who drowned 
her three kittens in a water-butt, for no reason, 
apparently, save to be rid of them, and that 
she might lie in peace on the hearth rug, — a 
murder well planned, deliberate, and cruel. 

"So Tiberius might have sat, 
Had Tiberius been a cat." 

Only in her grace and beauty, her love of 
comfort, her dignity of bearing, her courteous 
reserve, and her independence of character 
does puss remain immutable and unchanged. 
These are the traits which win for her the 
warmest corner by the fire, and the unshaken 
regard of those who value her friendship and 
aspire to her affection. These are the traits so 
subtly suggested by Mrs. Tomson in a sonnet 
which every true lover of cats feels in his heart 
must have been addressed to his own particu- 
lar pet : — 

" Half gentle kindliness, and half disdain, 
Thou comest to my call, serenely suave, 
With humming speech and gracious gestures grave, 
In salutation courtly and urbane ; 
Yet must I humble me thy grace to gain, 
For wiles may win thee, but no arts enslave ; 



32 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

And nowhere gladly thou abidest, save 

Where naught disturbs the concord of thy reign. 

" Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign' st to dwell 
Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease, 
Thine is the lore of Ra and Ranieses ; 
That men forget dost thou remember well, 
Beholden still in blinking reveries, 
With sombre sea-green gaze inscrutable." 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 

Now and then I hear it affirmed by sad- 
voiced pessimists, whispering in the gloom, 
that people do not read as much poetry in 
our day as they did in our grandfathers', that 
this is distinctly the era of prose, and that 
the poet is no longer, as Shelley claimed, 
the unacknowledged legislator of the world. 
Perhaps these cheerless statements are true, 
though it would be more agreeable not to 
believe them. Perhaps, with the exception 
of Browning, whom we study because he is 
difficult to understand, and of Shakespeare, 
whom we read because it is hard to content 
our souls without him, the poets have slipped 
away from our crowded lives, and are best 
known to us through the medium of their 
reviewers. We are always wandering from 
the paths of pleasure, and this may be one of 
our deviations. Yet what matters it, after 
all, while around us, on every side, in school- 



34 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

rooms and nurseries, in quiet corners and by 
cheerful fires, the children are reading poetry ? 
— reading it with a joyous enthusiasm and an 
absolute surrendering of spirit which we can 
all remember, but can never feel again. Well 
might Sainte-Beuve speak bravely of the clear 5 
fine penetration peculiar to childhood. Well 
might he recall, with wistful sighs, " that 
instinctive knowledge which afterwards ripens 
into judgment, but of which the fresh lu- 
cidity remains forever unapproached." He 
knew, as all critics have known, that it is only 
the child who responds swiftly, pliantly, and 
unreservedly to the allurements of the ima- 
gination. He knew that, when poetry is in 
question, it is better to feel than to think ; 
and that with the growth of a guarded and 
disciplined intelligence, straining after the en- 
joyment which perfection in literary art can 
give, the first careless rapture of youth fades 
into a half -remembered dream. 

If we are disposed to doubt the love that 
children bear to poetry, a love concerning 
which they exhibit a good deal of reticence, 
let us consider only the alacrity with which 
they study, for their own delight, the poems 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 35 

that please them best. How should we fare, 
I wonder, if tried by a similar test ? How 
should we like to sit down and commit to 
memory Tennyson's " QEnone, " or "Locksley 
Hall," or Byron's apostrophe to the Ocean, or 
the battle scene in " Marmion " ? Yet I have 
known children to whom every word of these 
and many other poems was as familiar as the 
alphabet ; and a great deal more familiar — 
thank Heaven ! — than the multiplication 
table, or the capitals of the United States. A 
rightly constituted child may find the paths of 
knowledge hopelessly barred by a single page 
of geography, or by a single sum in fractions ; 
but he will range at pleasure through the 
paths of poetry, having the open sesame to 
every door. Sir Walter Scott, who was essen- 
tially a rightly constituted child, did not even 
wait for a formal introduction to his letters, 
but managed to learn the ballad of Hardy- 
knute before he knew how to read, and went 
shouting it around the house, warming his 
baby blood to fighting-point, and training 
himself in very infancy to voice the splendors 
of his manhood. He remembered this ballad, 
too, and loved it all his life, reciting it once 



36 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

with vast enthusiasm to Lord Byron, whose 
own unhappy childhood had been softened 
and vivified by the same innocent delights. 

In truth, the most charming thing about 
youth is the tenacity of its impressions. If 
we had the time and courage to study a dozen 
verses to-day, we should probably forget 
eleven of them in a fortnight ; but the poetry 
we learned as children remains, for the most 
part, indelibly fixed in our memories, and 
constitutes a little Golden Treasury of our 
own, more dear and valuable to us than any 
other collection, because it contains only our 
chosen favorites, and is always within the reach 
of reference. Once, when I was very young, I 
asked a girl companion — well known now in 
the world of literature — if she did not grow 
weary waiting for trains, which were always 
late, at the suburban station where she went 
to school. " Oh, no," was the cheerful reply. 
"If I have no book, and there is no one 
here to talk with, I walk up and down the 
platform and think over the poetry that I 
know." Admirable occupation for an idle 
minute ! Even the tedium of railway travel- 
ing loses half its horrors if one can withdraw 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 37 

at pleasure into the society of the poets and, 
soothed by their gentle and harmonious voices, 
forget the irksome recurrence of familiar 
things. 

It has been often demonstrated, and as 
often forgotten, that children do not need to 
have poetry written down to their intellectual 
level, and do not love to see the stately Muse 
ostentatiously bending to their ear. In the 
matter of prose, it seems necessary for them 
to have a literature of their own, over which 
they linger willingly for a little while, as 
though in the sunny antechamber of a king. 
But in the golden palace of the poets there is 
no period of probation, there is no enforced 
attendance upon petty things. The clear- 
eyed children go straight to the heart of the 
mystery, and recognize in the music of words, 
in the enduring charm of metrical quality, an 
element of never-ending delight. When to 
this simple sensuous pleasure is added the 
enchantment of poetic images, lovely and 
veiled and dimly understood, then the delight 
grows sweeter and keener, the child's soul 
flowers into a conscious love of poetry, and 
one lifelong source of happiness is gained. 



38 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

But it is never through infantine or juvenile 
verses that the end is reached. There is no 
poet dearer to the young than Tennyson, and 
it was not the least of his joys to know that 
all over the English-speaking world children 
were tuning their hearts to the music of his 
lines, were dreaming vaguely and rapturously 
over the beauty he revealed. Therefore the 
insult seemed greater and more wanton when 
this beloved idol of our nurseries deliberately 
offered to his eager audience such anxiously 
babyish verses as those about Minnie and 
Winnie, and the little city maiden who goes 
straying among the flowers. Is there in 
Christendom a child who wants to be told by 
one of the greatest of poets that 

" Minnie and Winnie 
Slept in a shell ; ' ' 

that the shell was pink within and silver with- 
out ; and that 

" Sounds of the great sea 
Wandered about. 

4 ' Two bright stars 

Peep'd into the shell. 
' What are they dreaming of ? 
Who can tell?' 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 39 

" Started a green linnet 

Out of the croft ; 
' Wake, little ladies, 
The sun is aloft.' " 

It is not in these tones that poetry speaks 
to the childish soul, though it is too often in 
this fashion that the poet strives to adjust 
himself to what he thinks is the childish 
standard. He lowers his sublime head from 
the stars, and pipes with painstaking flatness 
on a little reed, while the children wander far 
away, and listen breathlessly to older and 
dreamier strains. 

" She left the web, she left the loom, 
She made three paces thro' the room, 
She saw the water-lily bloom, 
She saw the helmet and the plume, 
She look'd down to Camelot, 
Out flew the web and floated wide ; 
The mirror crack'd from side to side ; 
' The curse is come upon me,' cried 
The Lady of Shalott."' 

Here is the mystic note that childhood loves, 
and here, too, is the sweet constraint of linked 
rhymes that makes music for its ears. How 
many of us can remember well our early joy 
in this poem, which was but as another and 



40 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

more exquisite fairy tale, ranking fitly with 
Andersen's " Little Mermaid, " and " Un- 
dine," and all sad stories of unhappy lives ! 
And who shall forget the sombre passion of 
" Oriana," of those wailing verses that rang 
through our little hearts like the shrill sob- 
bing of winter storms, of that strange tragedy 
that oppressed us more with fear than pity ! 

" When the long dun wolds are ribb'd with snow, 
And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow, 

Oriana, 
Alone I wander to and fro, 

Oriana." 

If any one be inclined to think that children 
must understand poetry in order to appreciate 
and enjoy it, that one enchanted line, — 

" When the long dun wolds are ribb'd with snow," — 

should be sufficient to undeceive him forever. 
The spell of those finely chosen words lies in 
the shadowy and half-seen picture they con- 
vey, — a picture with indistinct outlines, as of 
an unknown land, where the desolate spirit 
wanders moaning in the gloom. The whole 
poem is inexpressibly alluring to an imagina- 
tive child, and its atmosphere of bleak de- 
spondency darkens suddenly into horror at 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 41 

the breaking off of the last line from visions 
of the grave and of peaceful death, — 

" I hear the roaring of the sea, 
Oriana." 

The same grace of indistinctness, though 
linked with a gentler mood and with a softer 
music, makes the lullaby in " The Princess " 
a lasting delight to children, while the pretty 
cradle-song in " Sea Dreams," beginning, — 

" What does little birdie say 
In her nest at peep of day ? " 

has never won their hearts. Its motive is too 
apparent, its nursery flavor too pronounced. 

It has none of the condescension of " Minnie 
and Winnie," and grown people can read it 
with pleasure ; but a simple statement of ob- 
vious truths, or a simple line of obvious rea- 
soning, however dexterously narrated in prose 
or verse, has not the art to hold a youthful 
soul in thrall. 

If it be a matter of interest to know what 
poets are most dear to the children around 
us, to the ordinary " apple-eating " little boys 
and girls for whom we are hardly brave 
enough to predict a shining future, it is de- 
lightful to be told by favorite authors and 



42 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

by well-loved men of letters what poets first 
bewitched their ardent infant minds. It is 
especially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Lang 
admit us a little way into his confidence, and 
confess to us that he disliked "Tarn O'Shan- 
ter " when his father read it aloud to him; pre- 
ferring, very sensibly, " to take my warlocks 
and bogies with great seriousness." Of course 
he did, and the sympathies of all children are 
with him in his choice. The ghastly details 
of that witches' Sabbath are far beyond a 
child's limited knowledge of demonology and 
the Scotch dialect. Tarn's escape and Mag- 
gie's final catastrophe seem like insults offered 
to the powers of darkness ; only the humor of 
the situation is apparent, and humor is seldom, 
to the childish mind, a desirable element of 
poetry. Not all the spirit of Caldecott's illus- 
trations can make " John Gilpin " a real fa- 
vorite in our nurseries, while " The Jackdaw of 
Rheims " is popular simply because children, 
being proof against cynicism, accept the story 
as it is told, with much misplaced sympathy 
for the thievish bird, and many secret rejoi- 
cings over his restoration to grace and feath- 
ers. As for " The Pied Piper of Hamelin," 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 43 

its humor is swallowed up in tragedy, and the 
terror of what is to come helps little readers 
over such sad stumbling-blocks as 

" So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, 
Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon ! ' ' 

lines which are every whit as painful to their 
ears as to ours. I have often wondered how 
the infant Southeys and Coleridges, that 
bright-eyed group of alert and charming chil- 
dren, all afire with romantic impulses, received 
"The Cataract of Lodore," when papa Southey 
condescended to read it in the schoolroom. 
What well-bred efforts to appear pleased and 
grateful ! What secret repulsion to a senseless 
clatter of words, as remote from the silvery 
sweetness, the cadenced music of falling waters, 
as from the unalterable requirements of poetic 
art! 

" And moreover he tasked me 
To tell him in rhyme." 

Ah ! unwise little son, to whose rash request 
generations of children have owed the presence, 
in readers and elocution-books and volumes of 
" Select Lyrics for the Nursery," of those 
hated and hateful verses. 

" Poetry came to me with Sir Walter Scott," 



44 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

says Mr. Lang ; with " Marmion," and the 
"Last Minstrel," and "The Lady of the 
Lake," read "for the twentieth time," and 
ever with fresh delight. Poetry came to Scott 
with Shakespeare, studied rapturously by fire- 
light in his mother's dressing-room, when all 
the household thought him fast asleep, and with 
Pope's translation of the Iliad, that royal road 
over which the Muse has stepped, smiling, 
into many a boyish heart. Poetry came to 
Pope — poor little lame lad — with Spenser's 
" Faerie Queene ; " with the brave adventures 
of strong, valiant knights, who go forth, un- 
blemished and unfrighted, to do battle with 
dragons and "Paynims cruel." And so the 
links of the magic chain are woven, and child 
hands down to child the spell that holds the 
centuries together. I cannot bear to hear the 
unkind things which even the most tolerant of 
critics are wont to say about Pope's " Iliad," 
remembering as I do how many boys have re- 
ceived from its pages their first poetic stimulus, 
their first awakening to noble things. What 
a charming picture we have of Coleridge, a 
feeble, petulant child tossing with fever on his 
little bed, and of his brother Francis stealing 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 45 

up, in defiance of all orders, to sit by his side 
and read him Pope's translation of Homer. 
The bond that drew these boys together was 
forged in such breathless moments and in such 
mutual pleasures ; for Francis, the handsome, 
spirited sailor lad, who climbed trees, and 
robbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports, 
had little in common with his small, silent, pre- 
cocious brother. " Frank had a violent love 
of beating me," muses Coleridge, in a tone of 
mild complaint (and no wonder, we think, for 
a more beatable child than Samuel Taylor it 
would have been hard to find). " But when- 
ever that was superseded by any humor or 
circumstance, he was very fond of me, and used 
to regard me with a strange mixture of admira- 
tion and contempt." More contempt than ad- 
miration, probably ; yet was all resentment 
forgotten, and all unkindness at an end, while 
one boy read to the other the story of Hector 
and Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with sorrow 
in his heart, pacing round his dead comrade, 
as a tawny lioness paces round her young 
when she sees the hunters coming through 
the woods. As a companion picture to this 
we have little Dante Gabriel Kossetti playing 



46 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

Othello in the nursery, and so carried away by 
the passionate impulse of these lines, — 

" In Aleppo once, 
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk 
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, 
I took by the throat the circumcised dog, 
And smote him, thus," — 

that he struck himself fiercely on the breast 
with an iron chisel, and fainted under the 
blow. We can hardly believe that Shake- 
speare is beyond the mental grasp of childhood, 
when Scott, at seven, crept out of bed on 
winter nights to read " King Henry IV.," and 
Rossetti, at nine, was overwhelmed by the 
agony of Othello's remorse. 

On the other hand, there are writers, and 
very brilliant writers, too, whose early lives 
appear to have been undisturbed by such 
keenly imaginative pastimes, and for whom 
there are no well-loved and familiar figures 
illumined forever in " that bright, clear, undy- 
ing light that borders the edge of the oblivion 
of infancy." Count Tolstoi confesses himself 
to have been half hurt, half puzzled, by his 
fellow-students at the University of Mos- 
cow, who seemed to him so coarse and inele- 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 47 

gant, and yet who had read and enjoyed so 
much. " Pushkin and Zhukovsky were litera- 
ture to them," he says wistfully, " and not, as 
to me, little books in yellow bindings which I 
had studied as a child." But how, one won- 
ders, could Pushkin have remained merely a 
" little book in yellow binding " to any boy 
who had had the happiness of studying him as 
a child ? Pushkin is the Russian Byron, and 
embodies in his poems the same spirit of rest- 
less discontent, of dejected languor, of pas- 
sionate revolt ; not revolt against the Tsar, 
which is a limited and individual judgment, 
but revolt against the bitter penalties of life, 
which is a sentiment common to the youth of 
all nations and of every age. Yet there are 
Englishmen who have no word save that of 
scorn for Byron, and I feel uncertain whether 
such critics ever enjoyed the privilege of being 
boys at all. If to George Meredith's composed 
and complacent mind there strays any wanton 
recollection of young, impetuous days, how 
can he write with pen of gall these worse than 
churlish lines on Manfred ? — 

" Projected from the bilious Childe, 
This clatter jaw his foot could set 



48 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

On Alps, without a breast beguiled 

To glow in shedding" rascal sweat. 

Somewhere about his grinder teeth 

He mouthed of thoughts that grilled beneath, 

And summoned Nature to her feud 

With bile and buskin attitude.'' 

There is more of this pretty poem, but I have 
quoted as much as my own irascibility can 
bear. I, at least, have been a child, and have 
spent some of my childhood's happiest hours 
with Manfred on the Alps ; and have with 
him beheld 

" the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs 
In dizziness of distance," 

and have believed with all a child's sincerity 
in his remorseful gloom : — 

c ' for I have ceased 
To justify my deeds unto myself — 
The last infirmity of evil." 

Every line is inexpressibly dear to me now, 
recalling, as it does, the time " when I was in 
my father's house, and my path ran down with 
butter and honey." Once more I see the big, 
bare, old-fashioned parlor, to dust which was 
my daily task, my dear mother having striven 
long and vainly to teach my idle little hands 
some useful housewifely accomplishment. In 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 49 

one corner stood a console-table, with chilly 
Parian ornaments on top, and underneath a 
pile of heavy books ; Wordsworth, Moore, the 
poems of Frances Sargent Osgood, — no lack 
of variety here, — " The Lady of the Lake," 
and Byron in an embossed brown binding, with 
closely printed double columns, well calculated 
to dim the keenest sight in Christendom. Not 
that mysterious and malignant mountain which 
rose frowning from the sea, and drew all ships 
shattered to its feet, was more irresistible in 
its attraction than this brown, bulky Byron. 
I could not pass it by ! My dusting never got 
beyond the table where it lay ; but sitting 
crumpled on the floor, with the enchanted 
volume on my lap, I speedily forgot every- 
thing in the world save only the wandering 
Childe, 

" Who ne in virtue's ways did take delight," 

or " The Corsair," or "Mazeppa," or "Man- 
fred," best loved of that dark group. Perhaps 
Byron is not considered wholesome reading for 
little girls in these careful days when expur- 
gated editions of " The Vicar of Wakefield " 
and " Paul and Virginia " find favor in our 
nurseries. On this score I have no defense to 



50 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

offer, and I am not proposing the poet as a 
safe text-book for early youth ; but having 
never been told that there was such a thing 
as forbidden fruit in literature, I was spared 
at least that alert curiosity concerning it 
which is one of the most unpleasant results of 
our present guarded system. Moreover, we 
have Goethe's word for it that Byron is not 
as immoral as the newspapers, and certainly 
he is more agreeable reading. I do sincerely 
believe that if part of his attraction for the 
young lies in what Mr. Pater calls "the 
grieved dejection, the endless regret," which 
to the undisciplined soul sounds like the true 
murmur of life, a better part lies in his large 
grasp of nature, — not nature in her minute 
and lovely detail, but in her vast outlines, 
her salient features, her solemn majesty and 
strength. Crags and misty mountain tops, 
storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of the 
restless deep, — these are the aspects of nature 
that childhood prizes, and loves to hear de- 
scribed in vigorous verse. The pink-tipped 
daisy, the yellow primrose, and the freckled 
nest-eggs 

" Hatching in the hawthorn-tree " 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 51 

belong to a late stage of development. Eu- 
genie de Guerin, who recognized as clearly as 
Sainte-Beuve the " fine penetration " peculiar 
to children, and who regarded them ever with 
half -wistf id, half -wondering delight, has written 
some very charming suggestions about the kind 
of poetry, " pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate," 
which she considered proper food for these 
highly idealized little people, — " angels upon 
earth." The only discouraging part of her 
pretty pleading is her frank admission that — 
in French literature, at least — there is no such 
poetry as she describes, which shows how hard 
it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excel- 
lence. She endeavored sincerely, in her " In- 
fantines," to remedy this defect, to " speak to 
childhood in its own language ; " and her verses 
on " Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings," are 
quaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies. 
No child is strongly moved, or taught the en- 
during delight of song, by such lines as these, 
but most children will take a genuine pleasure 
in the baby angel who played with little Abel 
under the myrtle-trees, who made the first doll 
and blew the first bubble, and who finds a 
friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this 



52 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

big gray world. Strange to say, lie has his 
English counterpart in Mr. Robert Louis 
Stevenson's " Unseen Playmate," that shadowy 
companion whose home is the cave dug by 
childish hands, and who is ready to share all 
games in the most engaging spirit of accom- 
modation. 

" 'Tis he, when you play with your soldiers of tin, 
That sides with the Frenchmen, and never can win ; ' ' 

a touch of combative veracity which brings us 
down at once from Mademoiselle de Guerin's 
fancy flights to the real playground, where 
real children, very faintly resembling " angels 
upon earth," are busy with mimic warfare. 
Mr. Stevenson is one of the few poets whose 
verses, written especially for the nursery, have 
found their way straight into little hearts. 
His charming style, his quick, keen sympathy, 
and the ease with which he. enters into that 
brilliant world of imagination wherein chil- 
dren habitually dwell, make him their natural 
friend and minstrel. If some of the rhymes 
in "A Child's Garden of Verses" seem a trifle 
bald and babyish, even these are guiltless 
of condescension; while others, like "Travel," 
"Shadow March," and "The Land of Story- 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 53 

Books," are instinct with poetic life. I can 
only regret that a picture so faultless in detail 
as "Shadow March," where we see the crawl- 
ing darkness peer through the window pane, 
and hear the beating of the little boy's heart 
as he creeps fearfully up the stair, should be 
marred at its close by a single line of false 
imagery : — 

"All the wicked shadows coining, tramp, tramp, tramp, 
With the black night overhead," 

So fine an artist as Mr. Stevenson must know 
that shadows do not tramp, and that the recur- 
rence of a short, vigorous word which tells so 
admirably in Scott's " William and Helen," and 
wherever the effect of sound combined with 
motion is to be conveyed, is sadly out of place 
in describing the ghostly things that glide with 
horrible noiselessness at the feet of the fright- 
ened lad. Children, moreover, are keenly 
alive to the value and the suggestiveness of 
terms. A little eight-year-old girl of my ac- 
quaintance, who was reciting " Lord Ullin's 
Daughter," stopped short at these lines, — 

1 ' Adown the glen rode armed men. 

Their trampling sounded nearer," — 

and called out excitedly, " Don't you hear the 



54 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

horses?" She, at least, heard them as if with 
the swift apprehension of fear, heard them loud 
above the sounds of winds and waters, and 
rendered her unconscious tribute of praise to 
the sympathetic selection of words. 

There is, as we know, a great deal of poetry 
written every year for childish readers. Some 
of it makes its appearance in Christmas books, 
which are so beautifully bound and illustrated 
that the little foolish, feeble verses are forgiven, 
and in fact forgotten, ignored altogether amid 
more important accessories. Better poems than 
these are published in children's periodicals, 
where they form a notable feature, and are, 
I dare say, read by the young people whose 
tastes are catered to in this fashion. Those of 
us who are familiar with these periodicals — 
either weeklies or monthlies — are well aware 
that the verses they offer may be easily divided 
into three classes. First, mere rhymes and 
jingles, intended for very little readers, and 
with which it would be simple churlishness 
to quarrel. They do not aspire to be poetry, 
they are sometimes very amusing, and they 
have an easy swing that is pleasant alike to 
young ears and old. It must be a hard heart 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 55 

that does not sympathize with the unlucky and 
ill-mated gnome who was 

" full of fun and frolic, 
But his wife was melancholic ; " 

or with the small damsel in pigtail and pina- 
fore who comforts herself at the piano with 
this engaging but dubious maxim : — 

" Practicing" is good for a good little girl ; 
It makes her nose straight, and it makes her hair curl/' 

The second kind of verse appears to be written 
solely for the sake of the accompanying illus- 
tration, and is often the work of the illustrator, 
who is more at home with his pencil than his 
pen. Occasionally it is comic, occasionally 
sentimental or descriptive ; for the most part 
it is something in this style : — 

THE ELF AND THE BUMBLE BEE. 

" Oh, bumble bee ! 

Bumble bee ! 
Don't fly so near ! 
Or you will tumble me 
Over, I fear." 

" Oh, funny elf ! 

Funny elf ! 
Don't be alarmed ! 
I am looking* for honey, elf ; 
You sha'n't be harmed." 



56 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS, 

" Then tarry, 

Oh, tarry, bee ! 
Fill up your sack ; 
And carry, oh, carry me 
Home on your back." 1 

Now what child will read more than once these 
empty little verses (very prettily illustrated) 
when it is in his power to turn back to other 
sprites that sing in different strains, — to the 
fairy who wanders 

" Over hill, over dale, 
Thorough bush, thorough briar, " 

seeking pearl eardrops for the cowslips' ears ; 
or to that softer shape, the music of whose 
song, once heard, haunts us forever : — 

" Full fathom five thy father lies ; 

Of his bones are coral made ; 
Those are pearls that were his eyes : 

Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange." 

These are the sweet, mysterious echoes of true 
fairyland, where Shakespeare and little chil- 
dren wander at their will. 

Poems of the third class are intended for 
growing girls and boys, and aspire to be 

1 Oliver Herford in St. Nicholas. 



TEE CHILDREN'S POETS. 57 

considered literature. They are well written, 
as a rule, with a smooth fluency that seems to 
be the distinguishing gift of our minor verse- 
makers, who, even when they have least to say, 
say it with unbroken sweetness and grace. This 
pretty, easy insignificance is much better 
adapted to adult readers, who demand little 
of poets beyond brevity, than to children, 
who love large issues, real passions, fine emo- 
tions, and an heroic attitude in life. Pleas- 
ant thoughts couched in pleasant language, 
trivial details, and photographic bits of de- 
scription make no lasting apj)eal to the ex- 
pansive imagination of a child. Analysis is 
wasted upon him altogether, because he sees 
things swiftly, and sees them as a whole. He 
may disregard fine shading and minute merits, 
but there are no boundaries to his wandering 
vision. " Small sciences are the labors of our 
manhood, but the round universe is the play- 
thing of the boy." 

The painful lack of distinction in most of 
the poetry prepared especially for him chills 
his fine ardor and dulls his imagination. 
Subtle verses about moods and tempers, cal- 
culated to make healthy little readers emu- 



58 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

late Miss Martineau's peevish self-sympathy ; 
melancholy verses about young children who 
suffer poverty and disaster ; weird and unin- 
telligible verses, with all Poe's indistinctness 
and none of his music ; commonplace verses 
about bootblacks and newsboys ; descriptive 
verses about snowstorms and April showers; 
pious verses about infant prigs ; — verses of 
every kind, all on the same level of agreeable 
mediocrity, and all warranted to be so harm- 
less that a baby could hear them without 
blushing. Why, the child who reads " Young 
Lochinvar " is richer in that one good and gal- 
lant poem than the child who has all these 
modern substitutes heaped yearly at his fool- 
ish feet. 

For the question at issue is not what kind 
of poetry is wholesome for children, but what 
kind of poetry do children love. In nineteen 
cases out of twenty, that which they love is 
good for them, and they can guide themselves 
a great deal better than we can hope to guide 
them. I once asked a friend who had spent 
many years in teaching little girls and boys 
whether her small pupils, when left to their 
own discretion, ever chose any of the pretty, 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 59 

trivial verses out of new books and magazines 
for study and recitation. She answered, 
Never. They turned instinctively to the same 
old favorites she had been listening to so long ; 
to the same familiar poems that their fathers 
and mothers had probably studied and recited 
before them. " Hohenlinden," " Glenara," 
"Lord Tlllin's Daughter," "Young Lochin- 
var," " Rosabelle," " To Lucasta, on going to 
the Wars," the lullaby from " The Princess," 
" Lady Clara Vere de Yere," "Annabel Lee," 
Longfellow's translation of " The Castle by the 
Sea," and " The Skeleton in Armor," — these 
are the themes of which children never weary ; 
these are the songs that are 'sung forever in 
their secret Paradise of Delights. The little 
volumes containing such tried and proven 
friends grow shabby with much handling ; and 
I have seen them marked all over with myste- 
rious crosses and dots and stars, each of which 
denoted the exact degree of affection which the 
child bore to the poem thus honored and ap- 
proved. I can fancy Mr. Lang's " Blue Poetry 
Book" fairly covered with such badges of 
distinction ; for never before has any selection 
of poems appealed so clearly and insistently to 



60 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

childish tastes and hearts. When I turn over 
its pages, I feel as if the children of England 
must have brought their favorite songs to Mr 
Lang, and prayed, each one, that his own 
darling might be admitted, — as if they must 
have forced his choice into their chosen chan- 
nels. Its only rival in the field, Palgrave's 
" Children's Treasury of English Song," is 
edited with such nice discrimination, such 
critical reserve, that it is well-nigh flawless, — 
a triumph of delicacy and good taste. But 
much that childhood loves is necessarily ex- 
cluded from a volume so small and so care- 
fully considered. The older poets, it is true, 
are generously treated, — Herrick, especially, 
makes a braver show than he does in Mr. 
Lang's collection; and there are plenty of 
beautiful ballads, some of which, like " The 
Lass of Lochroyan," we miss sorely from the 
pages of the "Blue Poetry Book." On the 
other hand, where, in Mr. Palgrave's " Treas- 
ury," are those lovely snatches of song familiar 
to our earliest years, and which we welcome 
individually with a thrill of pleasure, as Mr. 
Lang shows them to us once more ? — " Rose 
Aylmer," "County Guy," "Proud Maisie," 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 61 

" How Sleep the Brave," " Nora's Vow," — 
the delight of my own childhood, — the pa- 
thetic " Farewell," — 

" It was a' for our rightf u' King 1 , 
We left fair Scotland's strand ; 
It was a' for our rightf u' King, 
We e'er saw Irish land," — 

and Hood's silvery little verses beginning, — 

' ' A lake and a fairy boat 

To sail in the moonlight clear, — 
And merrily we would float 

From the dragons that watch us here ! " 

All these and many more are gathered safely 
into this charming volume. Nothing we long 
to see appears to be left out, except, indeed, 
Waller's " Go, Lovely Rose," and Herrick's 
" Night Piece," both of them very serious omis- 
sions. It seems strange to find seven of Edgar 
Poe's poems in a collection which excludes the 
" Night Piece," so true a favorite with all girl 
children, and a favorite that, once rightfully 
established, can never be thrust from our affec- 
tions. As for Praed's " Red Fisherman," Mr. 
Lang has somewhere recorded his liking for 
this " sombre " tale, which, I think, embodies 
everything that a child ought not to love. It 



62 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

is the only poem in the book that I wish else- 
where ; but perhaps this is a perverse prejudice 
on my part. There may be little readers to 
whom its savage cynicism and gloom carry a 
pleasing terror, like that which oppressed my 
infant soul as I lingered with Goodman Brown 
in the awful witch-haunted forest where Haw- 
thorne has shown us the triumph of evil things. 
" It is his excursions into the unknown world 
which the child enjoys," says Mr. Lang ; and 
how shall we set a limit to his wanderings ! He 
journeys far with careless, secure footsteps ; 
and for him the stars sing in their spheres, 
and fairies dance in the moonlight, and the 
hoarse clashing of arms rings bravely from 
hard-won fields, and lovers fly together under 
the stormy skies. He rides with Lochinvar, 
and sails with Sir Patrick Speiis into the north- 
ern seas, and chases the red deer with Allen-a- 
Dale, and stands by Marmion's side in the 
thick of the ghastly fray. He has given his 
heart to Helen of Troy, and to the Maid of 
Saragossa, and to the pale child who met her 
death on the cruel Gordon spears, and to the 
lady with yellow hair who knelt moaning by 
Barthram's bier. His friends are bold Robin 



THE CHILDREN'S POETS. 63 

Hood, and Lancelot du Lac, and the white- 
plumed Henry of Navarre, and the princely 
scapegrace who robbed the robbers to make 
" laughter for a month, and a good jest for- 
ever." A lord]y company these, and seldom 
to be found in the gray walks of middle age. 
Robin Hood dwells not on the Stock Exchange, 
and Prince Hal dare not show his laughing 
face before societies for leveling thrones and 
reorganizing the universe. We adults pass 
our days, alas, in the Town of Stupidity, — 
abhorred of Bunyan's soul, — and our com- 
panions are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. 
Despondency, and Mr. Want-wit, still scrub- 
bing his Ethiopian, and Mr. Feeble-mind, and 
the " deplorable young woman named Dull." 
But it is better to be young, and to see the 
golden light of romance in the skies, and to 
kiss the white feet of Helen, as she stands like 
a star on the battlements. It is better to fol- 
low Hector to the fight, and Guinevere to the 
sad cloisters of Almesbury, and the Ancient 
Mariner to that silent sea where the death- 
fires gleam by night. Even to us who have 
made these magic voyages in our childhood 
there comes straying, at times, a pale reflection 



64 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

of that early radiance, a faint, sweet echo 
of that early song. Then the streets of the 
Town of Stupidity grow soft to tread, and Fal- 
stafFs great laugh frightens Mr. Despondency 
into a shadow. Then Madeline smiles on us 
under the wintry moonlight, and Porphyro 
steals by with strange sweets heaped in bas- 
kets of wreathed silver. Then we know that 
with the poets there is perpetual youth, and 
that for us, as for the child dreaming in the 
firelight, the shining casements open upon 
fairyland. 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 

When the world was younger and perhaps 
merrier, when people lived more and thought 
less, and when the curious subtleties of an ad- 
vanced civilization had not yet turned men's 
heads with conceit of their own enlightening 
progress from simple to serious things, poets 
had two recognized sources of inspiration, 
which were sufficient for themselves and for 
their unexacting audiences. They sang of 
love and they sang of war, of fair women and 
of brave men, of keen youthful passions and 
of the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosa- 
monde lingers " in Woodstocke bower," and 
Sir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte ; 
Annie of Lochroyan sails over the roughening 
seas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to the Chev- 
iot hills with fifteen hundred bowmen at his 
back. It did not occur to the thick-headed 
generation who first listened to the ballad of 
" Chevy Chace" to hint that the game was 



66 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

hardly worth the candle, or that poaching on 
a large scale was as reprehensible ethically as 
poaching on a little one. This sort of insight 
was left for the nineteenth-century philosopher, 
and the nineteenth - century moralist. In 
earlier, easier days, the last thing that a poet 
troubled himself about was a defensible motive 
for the battle in which his soul exulted. His 
business was to describe the fighting, not to 
justify the fight, which would have been a task 
of pure supererogation in that truculent age. 
Fancy trying to justify Kinmont Willie or 
Johnie of Braedislee, instead of counting the 
hard knocks they give and the stout men they 
lay low ! 

" Johnie 's set his back against an aik, 
His foot against a stane ; 
And he has slain the Seven Foresters, — 
He has slain them a' hut ane." 

The last echo of this purely irresponsible 
spirit may be found in the " War Song of 
Dinas Vawr," where Peacock, always three 
hundred years behind his time, sings of 
slaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness which 
only his admirable versification can excuse : — 

" The mountain sheep are sweeter, 
But the valley sheep are fatter ; 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 67 

We therefore deemed it meeter 

To carry off the latter. 

We made an expedition ; 

We met an host and quelled it ; 

We forced a strong position, 

And killed the men who held it.'" 

There is not even a lack of food at home — 
the old traditional dinner of spurs — to war- 
rant this foray. There is no hint of necessity 
for the harriers, or consideration for the har- 
ried. 

" We brought away from battle, 
And much their land bemoaned them, 
Two thousand head of cattle, 
And the head of him who owned them : 
Ednyfed, King of Dyf ed, 
His head was borne before us ; 
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, 
And his overthrow our chorus." 

It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistibly 
narrated ; but if the lines were a hair-breadth 
less mellifluous, I think we should call this a 
very barbarous method of campaigning. 

When the old warlike spirit was dying out 
of English verse, when poets had begun to 
meditate and moralize, to interpret nature and 
to counsel man, the good gods gave to Eng- 
land, as a link with the days that were dead, 



68 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton be- 
fore or since has ever sung, of battlefields and 
the hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds and 
midnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brig- 
nail banks, and the trooper shaking his silken 
bridle reins upon the river shore : — 

" Adieu for evermore, 

My love ! 
And adieu for evermore." 

These are not precisely the themes which 
enjoy unshaken popularity to-day, — " the poet 
of battles fares ill in modern England," says 
Sir Francis Doyle, — and as a consequence 
there are many people who speak slightingly of 
Scott's poetry, and who appear to claim for 
themselves some inscrutable superiority by so 
doing. They give you to understand, without 
putting it too coarsely into words, that they 
are beyond that sort of thing, but that they 
liked it very well as children, and are pleased 
if you enjoy it still. There is even a class of 
unfortunates who, through no apparent fault 
of their own, have ceased to take delight 
in Scott's novels, and who manifest a curious 
indignation because the characters in them go 
ahead and do things, instead of thinking and 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. G9 

talking about them, which is the present 
approved fashion of evolving fiction. Why, 
what time have the good people in " Quentin 
Durward " for speculation and chatter ? The 
rush of events carries them irresistibly into 
action. They plot, and fight, and run away, 
and scour the country, and meet with so many 
adventures, and perform so many brave and 
cruel deeds, that they have no chance for in- 
trospection and the joys of analysis. Natu- 
rally, those writers who pride themselves upon 
making a story out of nothing, and who are 
more concerned with excluding material than 
with telling their tales, have scant liking for 
Sir Walter, who thought little and prated not 
at all about the "art of fiction," but used the 
subjects which came to hand with the instinc- 
tive and unhesitating skill of a great artist. 
The battles in "Quentin Durward" and "Old 
Mortality " are, I think, as fine in their way as 
the battle of Flodden ; and Flodden, says Mr. 
Lang, is the finest fight on record, — " better 
even than the stand of Aias by the ships in 
the Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooers 
in the Odyssey." 

The ability to carry us whither he would, to 



70 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

show us whatever he pleased, and to stir our 
hearts' blood with the story of 

" old, unhappy, far-off things, 
And battles long" ago," 

was the especial gift of Scott, — of the man 
whose sympathies were as deep as life itself, 
whose outlook was as wide as the broad 
bosom of the earth he trod on. He believed 
in action, and he delighted in describing it. 
" The thinker's voluntary death in life " was 
not, for him, the power that moves the world, 
but rather deeds, — deeds that make history 
and that sing themselves forever. He honestly 
felt himself to be a much smaller man than 
Wellington. He stood abashed in the pres- 
ence of the soldier who had led large issues 
and controlled the fate of nations. He would 
have been sincerely amused to learn from 
"Robert Elsmere" — what a delicious thing 
it is to contemplate Sir Walter reading 
" Robert Elsmere " ! — that " the decisive 
events of the world take place in the intellect." 
The decisive events of the world, Scott held 
to take place in the field of action ; on the 
plains of Marathon and Waterloo rather than 
in the brain tissues of William Godwin. He 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 71 

knew what befell Athens when she could put 
forward no surer defense against Philip of 
Macedon than the most brilliant orations ever 
written in praise of freedom. It was better, 
he probably thought, to argue as the English 
did, u in platoons." The schoolboy who fought 
with the heroic " Green-Breeks " in the streets 
of Edinburgh ; the student who led the Tory 
youths in their gallant struggle with the riot- 
ous Irishmen, and drove them with stout cud- 
geling out of the theatre they had disgraced ; 
the man who, broken in health and spirit, was 
yet blithe and ready to back his quarrel with 
Gourgaud by giving that gentleman any satis- 
faction he desired, was consistent throughout 
with the simple principles of a bygone genera- 
tion. " It is clear to me," he writes in his jour- 
nal, " that what is least forgiven in a man of 
any mark or likelihood is want of that article 
blackguardly called pluck. All the fine quali- 
ties of genius cannot make amends for it. 
We are told the genius of poets especially 
is irreconcilable with this species of gren- 
adier accomplishment. If so, quel ehien de 
genie I 

Quel chien de genie indeed, and far beyond 



72 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

the compass of Scott, who, amid the growing 
sordidness and seriousness of an industrial 
and discontented age, struck a single resonant 
note that rings in our hearts to-day like the 
echo of good and joyous things : — 

" Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife ! 
To all the sensual world proclaim, 
One crowded hour of glorious life 
Is worth an age without a name." 

The same sentiments are put, it may be remem- 
bered, into admirable prose when Graham of 
Claverhouse expounds to Henry Morton his 
views on living and dying. At present, Phi- 
losophy and Philanthropy between them are 
hustling poor Glory into a small corner of the 
field. Even to the soldier, we are told, it 
should be a secondary consideration, or per- 
haps no consideration at all, his sense of 
duty being a sufficient stay. But Scott, like 
Homer, held somewhat different views, and 
absolutely declined to let " that jade Duty " 
have everything her own way. It is the plain 
duty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare's 
side and guard her as they were bidden, instead 
of which they rush off, with Sir Walter's tacit 
approbation, to the fray. 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 73 

" No longer Blount the view could bear : 
' By heaven and all its saints ! I swear 

I will not see it lost ! 
Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare 
May bid your beads and patter prayer, — 

I gallop to the host.' " 

It was this cheerful acknowledgment of hu- 
man nature as a large factor in life which 
gave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave, 
imperfect men ; which enabled him to draw 
with true and kindly art such soldiers as Le 
Balafre, and Dugald Dalgetty, and William 
of Deloraine. Le Balafre, indeed, with his 
thick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his own 
wisdom, his unswerving, almost unconscious 
courage, his readiness to risk his neck for a 
bride, and his reluctance to marry her, is 
every whit as veracious as if he were the over- 
analyzed child of realism, instead of one of 
the many minor characters thrust with wanton 
prodigality into the pages of a romantic novel. 
Alone among modern poets, Scott sings 
Homerically of strife. Others have caught 
the note, but none have upheld it with such sus- 
tained force, such clear and joyous resonance. 
Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is always 
too rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion. 



. 74 ESS A YS IN IDLENESS. 

He stirs brave hearts, it is true, and the finest 
tribute to his eloquence was paid by Mrs. 
Browning, who said she could not read the 
" Lays " lying down ; they drew her irresistibly 
to her feet. But when Macaulay sings of Lake 
Regillus, I do not see the battle swim before 
my eyes. I see — whether I want to or not — 
a platform, and the poet's own beloved school- 
boy declaiming with appropriate gestures those 
glowing and vigorous lines. When Scott sings 
of Hodden, I stand wraith-like in the thickest 
of the fray. I know how the Scottish ranks 
waver and reel before the charge of Stanley's 
men, how Tunstall's stainless banner sweeps 
the field, and how, in the gathering gloom, 

" The stubborn spearmen still made good 
Their dark impenetrable wood, 
Each stepping where his comrade stood, 
The instant that he fell." 

There is none of this noble simplicity in the 
somewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in the 
pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not 
the less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which 
read a little like old Kaiser William's war 
dispatches turned into verse. Better a thousand 
times are the splendid swing, the captivating 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 75 

enthusiasm of Drayton's "Agincourt," which 
hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred. 
Reading it, we are as keen for battle as were 
King Harry's soldiers straining at the leash. 
The ardor for strife, the staying power of 
quiet courage, all are here ; and here, too, a 
felicity of language that makes each noble 
name a trumpet blast of defiance, a fresh 
incentive to heroic deeds. 

" With Spanish yew so strong-, 
Arrows a cloth-yard long, 
That like to serpents stung, 

Piercing the weather ; 
None from his fellow starts, 
But playing manly parts, 
And like true English hearts, 

Stuck close together. 



" Warwick in blood did wade, 
Oxford the foe invade, 
And cruel slaughter made, 

Still as they ran up ; 
Suffolk his axe did ply, 
Beaumont and Willoughby 
Bare them right doughtily, 

Ferrers and Fanhope. 

" Upon Saint Crispin's day 
Fought was this noble fray, 
Which fame did not delay 
To England to carry ; 



76 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

Oh, when shall Englishmen 
With such acts fill a pen, 
Or England breed again 
Such a King Harry ? ' ' 

Political economists and chilly historians and 
all long-headed calculating creatures gener- 
ally may perhaps hint that invading France 
was no part of England's business, and rep- 
resented fruitless labor and bloodshed. But 
this, happily, is not the poet's point of view. 
He dreams with Hotspur 

' ' Of basilisks, of cannon, culvenn, 
Of prisoners' ransom and of soldiers slain, 
And all the 'currents of a heady fight." 

He hears King Harry's voice ring clearly above 
the cries and clamors of battle : — 

" Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more ; 
Or close the wall up with our English dead ; " 

and to him the fierce scaling of Harfleur and 
the field of Agincourt seem not only glorious 
but righteous things. "That pure and generous 
desire to thrash the person opposed to you 
because he is opposed to you, because he is not 
' your side,' " which Mr. Saintsbury declares 
to be the real incentive of all good war songs, 
hardly permits a too cautious analysis of mo- 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 77 

tives. Fighting is not a strictly philanthropic 
pastime, and its merits are not precisely the 
merits of church guilds and college settlements. 
Warlike saints are rare in the calendar, not- 
withstanding the splendid example of Michael, 
" of celestial armies, prince," and there is at 
present a shameless conspiracy on foot to 
defraud even St. George of his hard-won glory, 
and to melt him over in some modern crucible 
into a peaceful Alexandrian bishop. An Arian 
bishop, too, by way of deepening the scandal ! 
We shall hear next that Saint Denis was a 
Calvinistic minister, and Saint Iago, whom 
devout Spanish eyes have seen mounted in 
the hottest of the fray, was a friendly well- 
wisher of the Moors. 

But why sigh over fighting saints, in a day 
when even fighting sinners have scant measure 
of praise ? " Moral courage is everything. 
Physical heroism is a small matter, often triv- 
ial enough," wrote that clever, emotional, sen- 
sitive German woman, Eahel Varnhagen, at 
the very time when a little " physical heroism " 
might have freed her conquered fatherland. 
And this profession of faith has gone on in- 
creasing in popularity, until we have even a 



78 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

lad like the young Laurence Oliphant, with 
hot blood surging in his veins, gravely record- 
ing his displeasure because a parson " with 
a Crimean medal on his surplice " preached a 
rousing battle sermon to the English soldiers 
who had no alternative but to fight. "My 
natural man," confesses Oliphant naively, " is 
intensely warlike, which is just as low a passion 
as avarice or any other," — a curious moral 
perspective, which needs no word of comment, 
and sufficiently explains much that was to 
follow. We are irresistibly reminded by such 
a verdict of Shelley's swelling lines — 

" War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, 
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade ; " 

lines which, to borrow a witticism of Mr. Oscar 
Wilde's, have " all the vitality of error," and 
will probably be quoted triumphantly by Peace 
Societies for many years to come. 

In the mean time, there is a remarkable and 
very significant tendency to praise all war 
songs, war stories, and war literature gener- 
ally, in proportion to the discomfort and hor- 
ror they excite, in proportion to their inartistic 
and unjustifiable realism. I well remember, 
when I was a little girl, having a dismal 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 79 

French tale by Erckmaim-Chatrian, called 
" Le Consent," given me by a kindly disposed 
but mistaken friend, and the disgust with 
which I waded through those scenes of sordid 
bloodshed and misery, untouched by any fire 
of enthusiasm, any halo of romance. The 
very first description of Napoleon, — Napoleon, 
the idol of my youthful dreams, — as a fat, 
pale man, with a tuft of hair upon his fore- 
head, filled me with loathing for all that was 
to follow. But I believe I finished the book, 
— it never occurred to me, in those innocent 
days, not to finish every book that I began, — 
and then I re-read in joyous haste all of Sir 
Walter Scott's fighting novels, " Waverley," 
" Old Mortality," " Ivanhoe," " Quentin 
Durward," and even " The Abbot," which has 
one good battle, to get the taste of that abom- 
inable story out of my mouth. Of late years, 
however, I have heard a great deal of French, 
Russian, and occasionally even English litera- 
ture commended for the very qualities which 
aroused my childish indignation. No one has 
sung the praises of war more gallantly than 
Mr. Rudyard Kipling ; yet those grim verses 
called " The Grave of the Hundred Dead " — 



80 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

verses closely resembling the appalling speci- 
mens of truculency with which Mr. Ruskin 
began and ended his brief poetical career 
— have been singled out from their braver 
brethren for especial praise, and offered as 
" grim, naked, ugly truth " to those " who 
would know more of the poet's picturesque 
qualities." 

But " grim, naked, ugly truth " can never be 
made a picturesque quality, and it is not the 
particular business of a battle poem to empha- 
size the desirability of peace. We all know 
the melancholy anticlimax of Campbell's 
splendid song " Ye Mariners of England," 
when, to three admirable verses, the poet must 
needs add a fourth, descriptive of the joys 
of harmony, and of the eating and drinking 
which shall replace the perils of the sea. I 
count it a lasting injury, after having my 
blood fired with these surging lines, — 

" Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell, 
Your manly hearts shall glow, 
As ye sweep through the deep, 
While the stormy winds do blow ; 
While the battle rages loud and long, 
And the stormy winds do blow," — 

to be suddenly introduced to a scene of inglo- 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 81 

rious junketing ; and I am not surprised that 
Campbell's peculiar inspiration, which was 
born of war and of war only, failed him the 
instant he deserted his theme. Such shocking 
lines as 

" The meteor-flag of England 
Shall yet terrific burn," 

while quite in harmony with the poet's ordi- 
nary achievements, would have been simply 
impossible in those first three verses of "Ye 
Mariners," where he remains true to his one 
artistic impulse. He strikes a different and a 
finer note when, in " The Battle of the Baltic," 
he turns gravely away from feasting and jollity 
to remember the brave men who have died for 
England's glory : — 

" Let us think of them that sleep, 
Full many a fathom deep, 
By thy wild and stormy steep, 
Elsinore ! " 

To go back to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, how- 
ever, from whom I have wandered far, he is 
more in love with the " dear delights " of bat- 
tle than with its dismal carnage, and he wins 
an easy forgiveness for a few horrors by show- 
ing us much brave and hearty fighting. Who 
can forget the little Gurkhas drawing a deep 



82 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

breath of contentment when at last they see 
the foe, and gaping expectantly at their offi- 
cers, " as terriers grin ere the stone is cast 
for them to fetch ? " AYho can forget the 
joyous abandon with which Mulvaney the dis- 
reputable and his "four an' twenty young 
wans*' fling themselves upon Lungtungpen ? 
It is a good and wholesome thing for a man 
to be in sympathy with that primitive virtue, 
courage, to recognize it promptly, and to do 
honor to it under any flag. " Homer's heart 
is with the brave of either side," observes 
Mr. Lang ; " with Glaucus and Sarpedon of 
Lycia no less than with Achilles and Patro- 
clus." Scott's heart is with Surrey and Dacre 
no less than with Lennox and Argyle ; with 
the English hosts charging like whirlwinds to 
the fray no less than with the Scottish soldiers 
standing ringed and dauntless around their 
king. Theodore de Banville, hot with shame 
over fallen France, checks his bitterness to 
write some tender verses to the memory of a 
Prussian boy found dead on the field, with a 
bullet-pierced volume of Pindar on his breast. 
Dumas, that lover of all brave deeds, cries out 
with noble enthusiasm that it was not enough 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 83 

to kill the Highlanders at Waterloo, — " we 
had to push them down ! " and the reverse of 
the medal has been shown us by Mr. Lang in 
the letter of an English officer, who writes 
home that he woidd have given the rest of his 
life to have served with the French cavalry on 
that awful day. Sir Francis Doyle delights, 
like an honest and stout-hearted Briton, to pay 
an equal tribute of praise, in rather question- 
able verse, to the private of the Buffs, 

" Poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught, 
Bewildered and alone, " 

who died for England's honor in a far-off 
land; and to the Indian prince, Mehrab 
Khan, who, brought to bay, swore proudly 
that he would perish, 

1 ' to the last the lord 
Of all that man can call his own, " 

and fell beneath the English bayonets at the 
door of his zenana. This is the spirit by 
which brave men know one another the world 
over, and which, lying back of all healthy 
national prejudices, unites in a human brother- 
hood those whom the nearness of death has 
taught to start at no shadows. 



84 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

u Oh, east is east, and west is west, and never the two shall 

meet 
Till earth and sky stand presently at God's great Judgment 

Seat. 
But there is neither east nor west, border nor breed nor 

birth, 
When two strong" men stand face to face, though they come 

from the ends of the earth." 

Here is Mr. Kipling at his best, and here, 
too, is a link somewhat simpler and readier to 
hand than that much-desired bond of cultiva- 
tion which Mr. Oscar Wilde assures us will 
one day knit the world together. The time 
when Germany will no longer hate France, 
"because the prose of France is perfect," 
seems still as far-off as it is fair ; the day when 
" intellectual criticism will bind Europe to- 
gether" dawns only in the dreamland of 
desire. Mr. Wilde makes himself merry at 
the expense of "Peace Societies, so dear to 
the sentimentalists, and proposals for unarmed 
International Arbitration, so popular among 
those who have never read history ; " but crit- 
icism, the mediator of the future, " will anni- 
hilate race prejudices by insisting upon the 
unity of the human mind in the variety of its 
forms. If we are tempted to make war upon 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 85 

another nation, we shall remember that we are 
seeking to destroy an element of our own cul- 
ture, and possibly its most important element." 
This restraining impulse will allow us to fight 
only red Indians, and Feejeeans, and Bush- 
men, from whom no grace of culture is to be 
gleaned; and it may prove a strong induce- 
ment to some disturbed countries, like Ireland 
and Russia, to advance a little further along 
the paths of sweetness and light. Meanwhile, 
the world, which rolls so easily in old and 
w T ell-worn ways, will probably remember that 
"power is measured by resistance," and will 
go on arguing stolidly in platoons. 

" All healthy men like fighting and like the 
sense of danger ; all brave women like to hear 
of their fighting and of their facing danger," 
says Mr. Ruskin, who has taken upon himself 
the defense of war in his own irresistibly un- 
convincing manner. Others indeed have de- 
lighted in it from a purely artistic standpoint, 
or as a powerful stimulus to fancy. Mr. 
Saint sbury exults more than most critics in 
battle poems, and in those " half -inarticulate 
songs that set the blood coursing." Sir Fran- 
cis Doyle, whose simple manly soul never 



86 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

wearied of such themes, had no ambition to 
outgrow the first hearty sympathies of his boy- 
hood. "I knew the battle in 'Marmion' by 
heart almost before I could read," he writes in 
his " Reminiscences ; " " and I cannot raze out 
— I do not wish to raze out — of my soul all 
that filled and colored it in years gone by." 
Mr. Froude, who is as easily seduced by the 
picturesqueness of a sea fight as was Canon 
Kingsley, appears to believe in all seriousness 
that the British privateers who went plunder- 
ing in the Spanish main were insj)ired by a 
pure love for England, and a zeal for the 
Protestant faith. He can say truly with the 
little boy of adventurous humor, — 

" There is something that suits my mind to a T 
In the thought of a reg'lar Pirate King." 

Mr. Lang's love of all warlike literature is 
too w r ell known to need comment. As a child, 
he confesses he pored over "the fightingest 
parts of the Bible," when Sunday deprived 
him of less hallowed reading. As a boy, he 
devoted to Sir Walter Scott the precious hours 
which were presumably sacred to the shrine of 
Latin grammar. As a man, he lures us with 
glowing words from the consideration of politi- 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 87 

cal problems, or of our own complicated spirit- 
ual machinery, to follow the fortunes of the 
brave, fierce men who fought in the lonely 
north, or of the heroes who went forth in 
gilded armor " to win glory or to give it " be- 
fore the walls of Troy. In these days, when 
many people find it easier to read " The Ring 
and the Book " than the Iliad, Mr. Lang makes 
a strong plea in behalf of that literature which 
has come down to us out of the past to stand 
forevermore unrivaled and alone, stirring the 
hearts of all generations until human nature 
shall be warped from simple and natural lines. 
" With the Bible and Shakespeare," he says, 
" the Homeric jDoems are the best training for 
life. There is no good quality that they lack ; 
manliness, courage, reverence for old age and 
for the hospitable hearth, justice, piety, pity, 
a brave attitude towards life and death, are all 
conspicuous in Homer." It might be well, 
perhaps, to add to this long list one more in- 
comparable virtue, an instinctive and illogical 
delight in living. Amid shipwrecks and bat- 
tles, amid long wanderings and hurtling spears, 
amid sharp dangers and sorrows bitter to bear, 
Homer teaches us, and teaches us in right joy- 



88 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

fid fashion, the beauty and value of an ex- 
istence which we profess nowadays to find a 
little burdensome on our hands. 

All these things have the lovers of war said 
to us, and in all these ways have they striven 
to fire our hearts. But Mr. Ruskin is not 
content to regard any matter from a purely 
artistic standpoint, or to judge it on natural 
and congenital lines ; he must indorse it ethi- 
cally or condemn. Accordingly, it is not 
enough for him, as it would be for any other 
man, to claim that " no great art ever yet rose 
on earth but among a nation of soldiers." He 
feels it necessary to ask himself some searching 
and embarrassing questions about fighting 
" for its own sake," and as " a grand pastime," 
— questions which he naturally finds it ex- 
tremely difficult to answer. It is not enough 
for him to say, with equal truth and justice, 
that if " brave death in a red coat " be no bet- 
ter than "brave life in a black one," it is at 
least every bit as good. He must needs wax 
serious, and commit himself to this strong and 
doubtful statement : — 

" Assume the knight merely to have ridden 
out occasionally to fight his neighbor for exer- 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 89 

cise; assume liim even a soldier of fortune, 
and to have gained his bread and filled his 
purse at the sword's point. Still I feel as if 
it were, somehow, grander and worthier in him 
to have made his bread by sword play than 
any other play. I had rather he had made 
it by thrusting than by batting, — much more 
than by betting ; much rather that he should 
ride war horses than back race horses ; and — 
I say it sternly and deliberately — much 
rather would I have him slay his neighbor 
than cheat liim." 

Perhaps, in deciding a point as delicate as 
this, it woidd not be altogether amiss to con- 
sult the subject acted upon ; in other words, 
the neighbor, who, whatever may be his preju- 
dice against dishonest handling, might proba- 
bly prefer it to the last irredeemable disaster. 
In this commercial age we get tolerably ac- 
customed to being cheated — like the skinned 
eel, we are used to it, — but there is an old 
rhyme which tells us plainly that a broken 
neck is beyond all help of healing. 

No, it is best, when we treat a theme as 
many-sided as war, to abandon modern in- 
quisitorial methods, and confine ourselves to 



90 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

that good old-fashioned simplicity which was 
content to take short obvious views of life. It 
is best to leave ethics alone, and ride as lightly 
as we may. The finest poems of battle and of 
camp have been written in this unincumbered 
spirit, as, for example, that lovely little snatch 
of song from " Rokeby : " — 

" A weary lot is thine, fair maid, 

A weary lot is thine ! 
To pnll the thorn thy brow to braid, 

And press the rue for wine. 
A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien, 

A feather of the blue, 
A doublet of the Lincoln green, — 

No more of me you knew, 
My love ! 

No more of me you knew." 

And this other, far less familiar, which I quote 
from Lockhart's Spanish Ballads, and which 
is fitly called "The Wandering Knight's 
Song:*" — 

" My ornaments are arms, 
My pastime is in war, 
My bed is cold upon the wold, 
My lamp yon star. 

" My journey ings are long, 

My slumbers short and broken ; 
From hill to hill I wander still, 
Kissing thy token. 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 91 

" I ride from land to land, 
I sail from sea to sea ; 
Some day more kind I fate may find, 
Some night, kiss thee." 

Now, apart from the charming felicity of these 
lines, we cannot but be struck with their 
singleness of conception and purpose. " The 
Wandering Knight " is well-nigh as disincum- 
bered of mental as of material luggage. He 
rides as free from our tangled perplexity of 
introspection as from our irksome contrivances 
for comfort. It is not that he is precisely 
guileless or ignorant. One does not journey 
far over the world without learning the world's 
ways, and the ways of the men who dwell upon 
her. But the knowledge of things looked at 
from the outside is never the knowledge that 
wears one's soul away, and the traveling com- 
panion that Lord Byron found so ennuyant, 

"The blight of life — the demon Thought," 

forms no part of the " Wandering Knight's " 
equipment. As I read this little fugitive song 
which has drifted down into an alien age, I 
feel an envious liking for those days when the 
tumult of existence made its triumph, when 
action fanned the embers of joy, and when 



92 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

people were too busy with each hour of life, as 
it came, to question the usefulness or desira- 
bility of the whole. 

There is one more point to consider. Mr. 
Saintsbury appears to think it strange that 
battles, when they occur, and especially when 
they chance to be victories, should not imme- 
diately inspire good war songs. But this is 
seldom or never the case, " The Charge of the 
Light Brigade " being an honorable exception 
to the rule. Drayton's heroic ballad was writ- 
ten nearly two hundred years after the battle 
of Agincourt ; Flodden is a tale of defeat ; 
and Campbell, whose songs are so intoxicat- 
ingly warlike, belonged, I am sorry to say, to 
the " Peace at all price" party. The fact is 
that a battle fought five hundred years ago is 
just as inspiring to the poet as a battle fought 
yesterday ; and a brave deed, the memory of 
which comes down to us through centuries, 
stirs our hearts as profoundly as though we 
witnessed it in our own time. Sarpedon, leap- 
ing lightly from his chariot to dare an un- 
equal combat ; the wounded knight, Schon- 
burg, dragging himself painfully from amid 
the dead and dying to offer his silver shield to 



THE PRAISES OF WAR. 93 

his defenseless emperor ; the twenty kinsmen 
of the noble family of Trauttmansdorf who 
fell, under Frederick of Austria, in the single 
battle of Miihldorf ; the English lad, young 
Anstruther, who carried the queen's colors of 
the Royal Welsh at the storming of Sebasto- 
pol, and who, swift-footed as a schoolboy, was 
the first to gain the great redoubt, and stood 
there one happy moment, holding his flagstaff 
and breathing hard, before he was shot dead, 
— these are the pictures whose value distance 
can never lessen, and whose colors time can 
never dim. These are the deeds that belong 
to all ages and to all nations, a heritage for 
every man who walks this troubled earth. 
" All this the gods have fashioned, and have 
woven the skein of death for men, that there 
might be a song in the ears even of the folk 
of after time." 



LEISURE. 

" Zounds ! how has he the leisure to be sick ? " 

A VISITOR strolling through the noble 
woods of Ferney complimented Voltaire on 
the splendid growth of his trees. "Ay, v replied 
the great wit, half in scorn and half, perhaps, 
in envy, " they have nothing else to do ; " and 
walked on, deigning no further word of appro- 
bation. 

Has it been more than a hundred years 
since this distinctly modern sentiment was 
uttered, — more than a hundred years since 
the spreading chestnut boughs bent kindly 
over the lean, strenuous, caustic, disappointed 
man of genius who always had so much to 
do, and who found in the doing of it a 
mingled bliss and bitterness that scorched 
him like fever pain ? How is it that, while 
Dr. Johnson's sledge-hammer repartees sound 
like the sonorous echoes of a past age, Vol- 
taire's remarks always apjDear to have been 



LEISURE. 95 

spoken the day before yesterday? They are 
the kind of witticisms which we do not say 
for ourselves, simply because we are not witty ; 
but they illustrate with biting accuracy the 
spirit of restlessness, of disquiet, of intellec- 
tual vanity and keen contention which is the 
brand of our vehement and over-zealous gen- 
eration. 

" The Gospel of Work " — that is the phrase 
woven insistently into every homily, every 
appeal made to the conscience or the intelli- 
gence of a people who are now straining their 
youthful energy to its utmost speed. " Blessed 
be Drudgery ! " — that is the text deliberately 
chosen for a discourse which has enjoyed such 
amazing popularity that sixty thousand printed 
copies have been found all inadequate to sup- 
ply the ravenous demand. Headers of Dick- 
ens — if any one has the time to read Dickens 
nowadays — may remember Miss Monflather's 
inspired amendment of that familiar poem 
concerning the Busy Bee : — 

" In work, work, work. Id work alway, 
Let my first years be past." 

And when our first years are past, the same 
programme is considered adequate and satis- 



96 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

factory to the end. "A whole lifetime of 
horrid industry," — to quote Mr. Bagehot's 
uninspired words, — this is the prize dangled 
alluringly before our tired eyes ; and if we 
are disposed to look askance upon the booty, 
then vanity is subtly pricked to give zest to 
faltering resolution. " Our virtues would be 
proud if our faults whipped them not ; " they 
would be laggards in the field if our faults did 
not sometimes spur them to action. It is the 
psean of self-glorification that wells up perpet- 
ually from press and pulpit, from public ora- 
tors, and from what is courteously called liter- 
ature, that keeps our courage screwed to the 
sticking place, and veils the occasional bare- 
ness of the result with a charitable vesture of 
self-delusion. 

Work is good. No one seriously doubts 
this truth. Adam may have doubted it when 
he first took spade in hand, and Eve when 
she scoured her first pots and kettles ; but in 
the course of a few thousand years we have 
learned to know and value this honest, 
troublesome, faithful, and extremely exacting 
friend. But work is not the only good thing 
in the world ; it is not a fetich to be adored ; 



LEISURE. 97 

neither is it to be judged, like a sum in addi- 
tion, by its outward and immediate results. 
The god of labor does not abide exclusively 
in the rolling-mill, the law courts, or the corn- 
field. He has a twin sister whose name is 
leisure, and in her society he lingers now and 
then to the lasting gain of both. 

Sainte-Beuve, writing of Mme. de Sevigne 
and her time, says that we, " with our habits 
of positive occupation, can scarcely form a 
just conception of that life of leisure and 
chit-chat." " Conversations were infinite," 
admits Mme. de Sevigne herself, recalling the 
long summer afternoons when she and her 
guests walked in the charming woods of Les 
Rochers until the shadows of twilight fell. 
The whole duty of life seemed to be con- 
centrated in the pleasant task of entertain- 
ing your friends when they were with you, 
or writing them admirable letters when they 
were absent. Occasionally there came, even 
to this tranquil and finely poised French 
woman, a haunting consciousness that there 
might be other and harder work for human 
hands to do. " Nothing is accomplished day 
by day," she writes, doubtfully; "and life is 



98 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

made up of days, and we grow old and die." 
This troubled her a little, when she was all 
the while doing work that was to last for 
generations, work that was to give pleasure 
to men and women whose great-grandfathers 
were then unborn. Not that w r e have the 
time now to read Mme. de Sevigne ! Why, 
there are big volumes of these delightful 
letters, and who can afford to read big vol- 
umes of anything, merely for the sake of the 
enjoyment to be extracted therefrom ? It was 
all very well for Sainte-Beuve to say " Lisons 
tout Mme. de Sevigne," when the question 
arose how should some long idle days in a 
country-house be profitably employed. It was 
all very well for Sainte-Beuve to plead, with 
touching confidence in the intellectual pas- 
times of his contemporaries, " Let us treat 
Mme. de Sevigne as we treat Clarissa Har- 
lowe, when we have a fortnight of leisure 
and rainy weather in the country." A fort- 
night of leisure and rainy weather in the 
country ! The words would be antiquated 
even for Dr. Johnson. Rain may fall or rain 
may cease, but leisure comes not so lightly 
to our calling. Nay, Sainte-Beuve 's wistful 



LEISURE. 90 

amazement at the polished and cultivated 
inactivity which alone could produce such a 
correspondence as Mine, de Sevigne's is not 
greater than our wistful amazement at the 
critic's conception of possible idleness in bad 
weather. In one respect at least we follow 
his good counsel. We do treat Mme. de Se- 
vigne precisely as we treat Clarissa Harlowe ; 
that is, we leave them both severely alone, 
as being utterly beyond the reach of what we 
are pleased to call our time. 

And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who, 
taking his life in his two hands, disposed of it 
as he thought fit, with no restless self-accusa- 
tions on the score of indolence. In the world 
and of the world, yet always able to meet and 
greet the happy solitude of Gascony ; toiling 
with no thought of toil, but rather " to enter- 
taine my spirit as it best pleased," this man 
wrought out of time a coin which passes 
current over the reading world. And what 
of Horace, who enjoyed an industrious idle- 
ness, the bare description of which sets our 
hearts aching with desire ! " The picture 
which Horace draws of himself in his coun- 
try home," says an envious English critic, 



100 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

" affords us a delightful glimpse of such liter- 
ary leisure as is only possible in the golden 
days of good Haroun-Al-Raschid. Horace 
goes to bed and gets up when he likes ; there 
is no one to drag him down to the law courts 
the first thing in the morning, to remind him 
of an important engagement with his brother 
scribes, to solicit his interest with Maecenas, 
or to tease him about public affairs and the 
latest news from abroad. He can bury him- 
self in his Greek authors, or ramble through 
the woody glens which lie at the foot of 
Mount Ustica, without a thought of business 
or a feeling that he ought to be otherwise en- 
gaged." " Swim smoothly in the stream of 
thy nature, and live but one man," counsels 
Sir Thomas Browne ; and it may be this 
gentle current will bear us as bravely through 
life as if we buffeted our strength away in the 
restless ocean of endeavor. 

Leisure has a value of its own. It is not a 
mere handmaid of labor ; it is something we 
should know how to cultivate, to use, and to 
enjoy. It has a distinct and honorable place 
wherever nations are released from the pres- 
sure of their first rude needs, their first homely 



LEISURE. 101 

toil, and rise to happier levels of grace and 
intellectual repose. " Civilization, in its final 
outcome," says the keen young author of 
" The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani," " is heavily 
in the debt of leisure ; and the success of any 
society worth considering is to be estimated 
largely by the use to which its fortunati put 
their spare moments." Here is a sentiment 
so relentlessly true that nobody wants to be- 
lieve it. We prefer uttering agreeable plati- 
tudes concerning the blessedness of drudgery 
and the iniquity of eating bread earned by 
another's hands. Yet the creation of an ar- 
tistic and intellectual atmosphere in which 
workers can work, the expansion of a noble 
sympathy with all that is finest and most 
beautiful, the jealous guardianship of what- 
ever makes the glory and distinction of a 
nation ; this is achievement enough for the 
fortunati of any land, and this is the debt 
they owe. It can hardly be denied that the 
lack of scholarship — of classical scholarship 
especially — at our universities is due pri- 
marily to the labor-worship which is the prev- 
alent superstition of our day, and which, like 
all superstitions, has gradually degraded its 



102 ASSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

god into an idol, and lost sight of the higher 
powers and attributes beyond. The student 
who is pleased to think a knowledge of Ger- 
man " more useful " than a knowledge of 
Greek ; the parent who deliberately declares 
that his boys have " no time to waste " over 
Homer ; the man who closes the doors of his 
mind to everything that does not bear directly 
on mathematics, or chemistry, or engineering, 
or whatever he calls "work;" all these plead 
in excuse the exigencies of life, the absolute 
and imperative necessity of labor. 

It would appear, then, that we have no 
fortunati, that we are not yet rich enough to 
afford the greatest of all luxuries — leisure to 
cultivate and enjoy " the best that has been 
known and thought in the world. " This is a 
pity, because there seems to be money in plenty 
for so many less valuable things. The yearly 
taxes of the United States sound to innocent 
ears like the fabled wealth of the Orient ; the 
yearly expenditures of the people are on no 
rigid scale ; yet we are too poor to harbor the 
priceless literature of the past because it is not 
a paying investment, because it will not put 
bread in our mouths nor clothes on our shiver- 



LEISURE. 103 

ing nakedness. ;i Poverty is a most odious 
calling," sighed Burton many years ago, and 
we have good cause to echo his lament. Until 
we are able to believe, with that enthusiastic 
Greek scholar, Mr. Butcher, that " intellectual 
training is an end in itself, and not a mere 
preparation for a trade or a profession ; " until 
we begin to understand that there is a leisure 
which does not mean an easy sauntering 
through life, but a special form of activity, 
employing all our faculties, and training us to 
the adequate reception of whatever is most 
valuable in literature and art ; until we learn 
to estimate the fruits of self-culture at their 
proper worth, we are still far from reaping the 
harvest of three centuries of toil and struggle ; 
we are still as remote as ever from the serenity 
of intellectual accomplishment. 

There is a strange pleasure in work wedded 
to leisure, in work which has grown beautiful 
because its rude necessities are softened and 
humanized by sentiment and the subtle grace 
of association. A little paragraph from the 
journal of Eugenie de Guerin illustrates with 
charming simplicity the gilding of common 
toil by the delicate touch of a cultivated and 
sympathetic intelligence : — 



104 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

" A day spent in spreading out a large wash 
leaves little to say, and yet it is rather pretty, 
too, to lay the white linen on the grass, or to 
see it float on lines. One may fancy one's self 
Homer's Nausicaa, or one of those Biblical 
princesses who washed their brothers' tunics. 
We have a basin at Moulinasse that you have 
never seen, sufficiently large, and full to the 
brim of water. It embellishes the hollow, and 
attracts the birds who like a cool place to 
sing in." 

In the same spirit, Maurice de Guerin con- 
fesses frankly the pleasure he takes in gather- 
ing fagots for the winter fire, " that little task 
of the woodcutter which brings us close to 
nature," and which was also a favorite occupa- 
tion of M. de Lamennais. The fagot gather- 
ing, indeed, can hardly be said to have 
assumed the proportions of real toil ; it was 
rather a pastime where play was thinly dis- 
guised by a pretty semblance of drudgery. 
" Idleness," admits de Guerin, " but idleness 
full of thought, and alive to every impres- 
sion" Eugenie's labors, however, had other 
aspects and bore different fruit. There is 
nothing intrinsically charming in stitching 



LEISURE. 105 

seams, hanging out clothes, or scorching one's 
fingers over a kitchen fire ; yet every page 
in the journal of this nobly born French girl 
reveals to us the nearness of work, work made 
sacred by the prompt fulfillment of visible 
duties, and — what is more rare — made beau- 
tiful by that distinction of mind which was 
the result of alternating hours of finely culti- 
vated leisure. A very ordinary and estimable 
young woman might have spread her wash 
upon the grass with honest pride at the white 
ness of her linen ; but it needed the solitude 
of Le Cayla, the few books, well read and 
well worth reading, the life of patriarchal 
simplicity, and the habit of sustained and 
delicate thought, to awaken in the worker's 
mind the graceful association of ideas, — the 
pretty picture of Nausicaa and her maidens 
cleansing their finely woven webs in the cool, 
rippling tide. 

For it is self -culture that warms the chilly 
earth wherein no good seed can mature; it 
is self-culture that distinguishes between the 
work which has inherent and lasting value 
and the work which represents conscientious 
activity and no more. And for the training 



106 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

of one's self, leisure is requisite ; leisure and 
that rare modesty which turns a man's 
thoughts back to his own shortcomings and 
requirements, and extinguishes in him the 
burning desire to enlighten his fellow-beings. 
"We might make ourselves spiritual by de- 
taching ourselves from action, and become 
perfect by the rejection of energy," says Mr. 
Oscar Wilde, who delights in scandalizing his 
patient readers, and who lapses unconsciously 
into something resembling animation over the 
wrongs inflicted by the solemn preceptors of 
mankind. The notion that it is worth while 
to learn a thing only if you intend to impart 
it to others is widespread and exceedingly 
popular. I have myself heard an excellent 
and anxious aunt say to her young niece, 
then working hard at college, " But, my dear, 
why do you give so much of your time to 
Greek? You don't expect to teach it, do 
you ? " — as if there were no other use to 
be gained, no other pleasure to be won from 
that noble language, in which lies hidden 
the hoarded treasure of centuries. To study 
Greek in order to read and enjoy it, and 
thereby make life better worth the living, 



LEISURE. 107 

is a possibility that seldom enters the practi- 
cal modern mind. 

Yet this restless desire to give out infor- 
mation, like alms, is at best a questionable 
bounty ; this determination to share one's wis- 
dom with one's unwilling fellow-creatures is a 
noble impulse provocative of general discon- 
tent. When Southey, writing to James Murray 
about a dialogue which he proposes to publish 
in the " Quarterly," says, with characteristic 
complacency : " I have very little doubt that it 
will excite considerable attention, and lead 
many persons into a wholesome train of 
thought, " we feel at once how absolutely fa- 
miliar is the sentiment, and how absolutely 
hopeless is literature approached in this spirit. 
The same principle, working under different 
conditions to-day, entangles us in a network of 
lectures, which have become the chosen field 
for every educational novelty, and the diversion 
of the mentally unemployed. 

Charles Lamb has recorded distinctly his 
veneration for the old-fashioned schoolmaster 
who taught his Greek and Latin in leisurely 
fashion day after day, with no thought wasted 
upon more superficial or practical acquirements, 



108 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

and who " came to his task as to a sport." He 
has made equally plain his aversion for the new- 
fangled pedagogue — new in his time, at least 
— who could not "relish a beggar or a gypsy" 
without seeking to collect or to impart some 
statistical information on the subject. A gen- 
tleman of this calibre, his fellow -traveler in 
a coach, once asked him if he had ever made 
" any calculation as to the value of the rental 
of all the retail shops in London ? " and the 
magnitude of the question so overwhelmed 
Lamb that he could not even stammer out a 
confession of his ignorance. "To go preach 
to the first passer-by, to become tutor to the 
ignorance of the first thing I meet, is a task 
I abhor," observes Montaigne, who must cer- 
tainly have been the most acceptable compan- 
ion of his day. 

Dr. Johnson, too, had scant sympathy with 
insistent and arrogant industry. He could 
work hard enough when circumstances de- 
manded it ; but he " always felt an inclination 
to do nothing," and not infrequently gratified 
his desires. " No man, sir, is obliged to do as 
much as he can. A man should have part of 
his life to himself," was the good doctor's 



LEISURE. 109 

soundly heterodox view, advanced upon many 
occasions. He hated to hear people boast of 
their assiduity, and nipped such vain preten- 
sions in the bud with frosty scorn. When he 
and Bos well journeyed together in the Har- 
wich stage-coach, a "fat, elderly gentle-wo- 
man," who had been talking freely of her own 
affairs, wound up by saying that she never 
permitted any of her children to be for a 
moment idle. " I wish, madam," said Dr. 
Johnson testily, " that you would educate me 
too, for I have been an idle fellow all my life." 
"I am sure, sir," protested the woman with 
dismayed politeness, " you have not been idle." 
" Madam," was the retort, "it is true ! And 
that gentleman there " — pointing to poor 
young Boswell — " has been idle also. He 
was idle in Edinburgh. His father sent him 
to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. 
He came to London, where he has been very 
idle. And now he is going to Utrecht, where 
he will be as idle as ever." 

That there was a background of truth in 
these spirited assertions we have every reason 
to be grateful. Dr. Johnson's value to-day 
does not depend on the number of essays, or 



110 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

reviews, or dedications he wrote in a year, — 
some years he wrote nothing, — but on his own 
sturdy and splendid personality; "the real 
primate, the soul's teacher of all England," 
says Carlyle ; a great embodiment of uncom- 
promising goodness and sense. Every genera- 
tion needs such a man, not to compile diction- 
aries, but to preserve the balance of sanity, 
and few generations are blest enough to possess 
him. As for Boswell, he might have toiled in 
the law courts until he was gray without ben- 
efiting or amusing anybody. It was in the 
nights he spent drinking port wine at the 
Mitre, and in the days he spent trotting, like 
a terrier, at his master's heels, that the seed 
was sown which was to give the world a mas- 
terpiece of literature, the most delightful bi- 
ography that has ever enriched mankind. It 
is to leisure that we owe the " Life of Johnson," 
and a heavy debt we must, in all integrity, 
acknowledge it to be. 

Mr. Shortreed said truly of Sir Walter 
Scott that he was " making himself in the 
busy, idle pleasures of his youth ; " in those 
long rambles by hill and dale, those whimsical 
adventures in farmhouses, those merry, pur- 



LEISURE. Ill 

poseless journeys in which the eager lad tasted 
the flavor of life. At home such unauthor- 
ized amusements were regarded with emphatic 
disapprobation. " I greatly doubt, sir," said 
his father to him one day, "that you were 
born for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut! " 
and one half pities the grave clerk to the Sig- 
net, whose own life had been so decorously 
dull, and who regarded with affectionate so- 
licitude his lovable and incomprehensible son. 
In later years Sir Walter recognized keenly 
that his w r asted school hours entailed on him a 
lasting loss, a loss he was determined his sons 
should never know. It is to be forever re- 
gretted that " the most Homeric of modern 
men could not read Homer." But every day 
he stole from the town to give to the country, 
-every hour he stole from law to give to liter- 
ature, every minute he stole from work to 
give to pleasure, counted in the end as gain. 
It is in his pleasures that a man really lives, 
it is from his leisure that he constructs the true 
fabric of self. Perhaps Charles Lamb's fellow- 
clerks thought that because his days were 
spent at a desk in the East India House, his 
life was spent there too. His life was far 



112 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

remote from that routine of labor ; built up of 
golden moments of respite, enriched with joys, 
chastened by sorrows, vivified by impulses 
that had no filiation with his daily toil. " For 
the time that a man may call his own," he 
writes to Wordsworth, " that is his life." 
The Lamb who worked in the India House, 
and who had " no skill in figures," has passed 
away, and is to-day but a shadow and a name. 
The Lamb of the " Essays " and the " Letters " 
lives for us now, and adds each year his 
generous share to the innocent gayety of the 
world. This is the Lamb who said, " Riches 
are chiefly good because they give us time," 
and who sighed for a little son that he might 
christen him Nothing-to-do, and permit him 
to do nothing. 



WORDS. 

" Do you read the dictionary ? " asked M. 
Theophile Gautier of a young and ardent dis- 
ciple who had come to him for counsel. " It 
is the most fruitful and interesting of books. 
Words have an individual and a relative value. 
They should be chosen before being placed in 
position. This word is a mere pebble ; that a 
fine pearl or an amethyst. In art the handi- 
craft is everything, and the absolute distinc- 
tion of the artist lies, not so much in his 
capacity to feel nature, as in his power to 
render it." 

We are always pleased to have a wholesome 
truth presented to us with such genial viva- 
city, so that we may feel ourselves less edified 
than diverted, and learn our lesson without 
the mortifying consciousness of ignorance. He 
is a wise preceptor who conceals from us his 
awful rod of office, and grafts his knowledge 
dexterously upon our self-esteem. 



114 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

' ' Men must be taught as if you taught them not, 
And thing's unknown proposed as things forgot." 

An appreciation of words is so rare that every- 
body naturally thinks he possesses it, and this 
universal sentiment results in the misuse of 
a material whose beauty enriches the loving 
student beyond the dreams of avarice. Mu- 
sicians know the value of chords ; painters 
know the value of colors ; writers are often so 
blind to the value of words that they are con- 
tent with a bare expression of their thoughts, 
disdaining the " labor of the file," and confi- 
dent that the phrase first seized is for them 
the phrase of inspiration. They exaggerate 
the importance of what they have to say, — 
lacking which we should be none the poorer, — ■ 
and underrate the importance of saying it in 
such fashion that we may welcome its very 
moderate significance. It is in the habitual 
and summary recognition of the laws of lan- 
guage that scholarship delights, says Mr. 
Pater ; and while the impatient thinker, eager 
only to impart his views, regards these laws 
as a restriction, the true artist finds in them 
an opportunity, and rejoices, as Goethe re- 
joiced, to work within conditions and limits. 



WORDS. 1.15 

For every sentence that may be penned or 
spoken the right words exist. They lie con- 
cealed in the inexhaustible wealth of a vocab- 
ulary enriched by centuries of noble thought 
and delicate manipulation. He who does not 
find them and fit them into place, who ac- 
cepts the first term which presents itself rather 
than search for the expression which accu- 
rately and beautifully embodies his meaning, 
aspires to mediocrity, and is content with fail- 
ure. The exquisite adjustment of a word to 
its significance, which was the instrument of 
Flaubert's daily martyrdom and daily triumph ; 
the generous sympathy of a word with its 
surroundings, which was the secret wrung by 
Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of 
language, — these are the twin perfections 
which constitute style, and substantiate genius. 
Cardinal Newman also possesses in an extraor- 
dinary degree Flaubert's art of fitting his 
words to the exact thoughts they are designed 
to convey. Such a brief sentence as " Ten 
thousand difficulties do not make one doubt " 
reveals with pregnant simplicity the mental 
attitude of the writer. Sir Thomas Browne, 
working, under fewer restraints, and without 



116 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

the severity of intellectual discipline, harmo- 
nizes each musical syllable into a prose of 
leisurely sweetness and sonorous strength. 
" Court not felicity too far, and weary not the 
favorable hand of fortune." " Man is a noble 
animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the 
grave." "The race of delight is short, and 
pleasures have mutable faces." Such sentences, 
woven with curious skill from the rich fabric 
of seventeenth - century English, defy the 
wreckage of time. In them a gentle dignity 
of thought finds its appropriate exj)ression, 
and the restfulness of an unvexed mind 
breathes its quiet beauty into each cadenced 
line. Here are no " boisterous metaphors," 
such as Dryden scorned, to give undue em- 
phasis at every turn, and amaze the careless 
reader with the cheap delights of turbulence. 
Here is no trace of that " full habit of 
speech," hateful to Mr. Arnold's soul, and 
which, in the years to come, was to be the gift 
of journalism to literature. 

The felicitous choice of words, which with 
most writers is the result of severe study and 
unswerving vigilance, seems with a favored 
few — who should be envied and not imitated 



WORDS. 117 

— to be the genuine fruit of inspiration, as 
though caprice itself could not lead them far 
astray. Shelley's letters and prose papers 
teem with sentences in which the beautiful 
words are sufficient satisfaction in themselves, 
and of more value than the conclusions they 
reveal. They have a haunting sweetness, a 
pure perfection, which makes the act of read- 
ing them a sustained and dulcet pleasure. 
Sometimes this effect is produced by a few 
simple terms reiterated into lingering music. 
" We are born, and our birth is unremembered, 
and our infancy remembered but in fragments : 
we live on, and in living we lose the apprehen- 
sion of life." Sometimes a clearer note is 
struck with the sure and delicate touch which 
is the excellence of art. " For the mind in 
creation is as a fading coal, which some invis- 
ible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens 
to transitory brightness." The substitution of 
the word " glow " for " brightness " would, I 
think, make this sentence extremely beautiful. 
If it lacks the fullness and melody of those 
incomparable passages in which Burke, the 
great master of words, rivets our admiration 
forever, it has the same peculiar and lasting 



118 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

hold upon our imaginations and our memo- 
ries. Once read, we can no more forget its 
charm than we can forget " that chastity of 
honor which felt a stain like a wound," or 
the mournful cadence of regret over virtues 
deemed superfluous in an age of strictly icon- 
oclastic progress. " Never more shall we be- 
hold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, 
that proud submission, that dignified obedi- 
ence, that subordination of the heart which 
kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit 
of an exalted freedom." It is the fashion 
at present to subtly depreciate Burke's power 
by some patronizing allusion to the "grand 
style," — a phrase which, except when applied 
to Milton, appears to hold in solution an un- 
defined and undefinable reproach. But until 
we can produce something better, or some- 
thing as good, those " long savorsome Latin 
words," checked and vivified by " racy Saxon 
monosyllables," must still represent an excel- 
lence which it is easier to belittle than to 
emulate. 

It is strange that our chilling disapproba- 
tion of what we are prone to call " fine writ- 
ing " melts into genial applause over the 



WORDS. 119 

freakish perversity so dear to modern unrest. 
TTe look askance upon such an old-time mas- 
ter of his craft as the Opium-Eater, and re- 
quire to be told by a clear-headed, unenthusi- 
astic critic like Mr. George Saintsbury that 
the balanced harmony of De Quincey's style 
is obtained often by the use of extremely 
simple words, couched in the clearest imagi- 
nable form. Place by the side of Mr. Pater's 
picture of Monna Lisa — too well known to 
need quotation — De Quincey's equally famous 
description of Our Lady of Darkness. Both 
passages are as beautiful as words can make 
them, but the gift of simplicity is in the 
hands of the older writer. Or take the single 
sentence which describes for us the mystery of 
Our Lady of Sighs : " And her eyes, if they 
were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor 
subtle ; no man could read their story ; they 
would be found filled with perishing dreams, 
and with wrecks of forgotten delirium." 
Here, as Mr. Saintsbury justly points out, are 
no needless adjectives, no unusual or extrava- 
gant words. The sense is adequate to the 
sound, and the sound is only what is required 
as accompaniment to the sense. We are not 



120 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

perplexed and startled, as when Browning in- 
troduces us to 

"the Tyrrhene whelk's pearl-sheeted lip," 

or to a woman's 

"morbid, olive, faultless shoulder-blades." 

We are not irritated and confused, as when 
Carlyle — whose misdeeds, like those of 
Browning, are matters of pure volition — is 
pleased, for our sharper discipline, to write 
" like a comet inscribing with its tail." No 
man uses words more admirably, or abuses 
them more shamefully, than Carlyle. That 
he should delight in seeing his pages studded 
all over with such spikes as " mammonism," 
" flunkeyhood," " nonentity," and " simula- 
crum," that he should repeat them again and 
again with unwearying self-content, is an 
enigma that defies solution, save on the simple 
presumption that they are designed, like other 
instruments of torture, to test the fortitude of 
the sufferer. It is best to scramble over them 
as bravely as we can, and forget our scars in 
the enjoyment of those vivid and matchless 
pictures in which each word plays its part, 
and supplies its share of outline and emphasis 



WORDS. 121 

to the scene. The art that can dictate such 
a brief bit of description as " little red-colored 
pidpy infants " is the art of a Dutch master 
who, on five inches of canvas, depicts for us 
with subdued vehemence the absolute realities 
of life. 

"All freaks," remarks Mr. Arnold, "tend 
to impair the beauty and power of language ; " 
yet so prone are we to confuse the bizarre 
with the picturesque that at present a great 
deal of English literature resembles a linguis- 
tic museum, where every type of monstrosity 
is cheerfully exhibited and admired. Writers 
of splendid capacity, of undeniable originality 
and force, are not ashamed to add their curios 
to the group, either from sheer impatience of 
restraint, or, as I sometimes think, from a 
grim and perverted sense of humor, which is 
enlivened by noting how far they can venture 
beyond bounds. When Mr. George Meredith 
is pleased to tell us that one of his characters 
"neighed a laugh," that another "tolled her 
naughty head," that a third " stamped ; her 
aspect spat," and that a fourth was discovered 
" pluming a smile upon his succulent mouth," 
we cannot smother a dawning suspicion that 



122 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

he is diverting himself at our expense, and 
pluming a smile of his own, more sapless than 
succulent, over the naive simplicity of the 
public. Perhaps it is a yearning after subtlety 
rather than a spirit of uncurbed humor which 
prompts Vernon Lee to describe for us Carlo's 
" dark Renaissance face perplexed with an in- 
cipient laugh ; " but really a very interesting 
and improving little paper might be written 
on the extraordinary laughs and smiles which 
cheer the somewhat saturnine pages of modern 
analytic fiction. " Correctness, that humble 
merit of prose," has been snubbed into a re- 
cognition of her insignificance. She is as 
tame as a woman with only one head and 
two arms amid her more striking and richly 
endowed sisters in the museum. 

" A language long employed by a delicate 
and critical society," says Mr. Walter Bage- 
hot, " is a treasure of dexterous felicities ; " 
and to awaken the literary conscience to its 
forgotten duty of guarding this treasure is the 
avowed vocation of Mr. Pater, and of another 
stylist, less understood and less appreciated, 
Mr. Oscar Wilde. Their labors are scantily 
rewarded in an age which has but little in- 



WORDS. 123 

stinct for form, and which habitually allows 
itself the utmost license of phraseology. That 
" unblessed freedom from restraint," which to 
the clear-eyed Greeks appeared diametrically 
opposed to a wise and well-ordered liberty, 
and which finds its amplest expression in the 
poems of Walt Whitman, has dazzled us only 
to betray. The emancipation of the savage is 
sufficiently comprehensive, but his privileges 
are not always as valuable as they may at first 
sight appear. Mr. Brownell, in his admira- 
ble volume " French Traits," unhesitatingly 
defines Whitman's slang as " the riotous 
medium of the under-languaged ; " and the re- 
proach is not too harsh nor too severe. Even 
Mr. G. C. Macaulay, one of the most acute 
and enthusiastic of his English critics, admits 
sadly that it is " gutter slang," equally pur- 
poseless and indefensible. That a man who 
held within himself the elements of greatness 
should have deliberately lessened the force of 
his life's work by a willful misuse of his 
material is one of those bitter and irremedi- 
able errors which sanity forever deplores. 
We are inevitably repelled by the employ- 
ment of trivial or vulgar words in serious 



124 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

poetry, and they become doubly offensive 
when brought into relation with the beauty 
and majesty of nature. It is neither pleasant 
nor profitable to hear the sun's rays described 
as 

" scooting obliquely high and low." 

It is still less satisfactory to have the universe 
addressed in this convivial and burlesque fash- 
ion : — 

" Earth, you seem to look for something at my hands ; 
Say, old Topknot, what do you want ? ' ' 

There is a kind of humorousness which a true 
sense of humor would render impossible ; 
there is a species of originality from which the 
artist shrinks aghast; and worse than mere 
vulgarity is the constant employment of words 
indecorous in themselves, and irreverent in 
their application, — the smirching of clean 
and noble things with adjectives grossly un- 
fitted for such use, and repellent to all the 
canons of good taste. This is not the " gentle 
pressure " which Sophocles put upon common 
words to wring from them a fresh significance ; 
it is a deliberate abuse of terms, and betrays 
a lack of that fine quality of self-repression 
which embraces the power of selection, and is 



WORDS. 125 

the best characteristic of literary morality. 
" Oh, for the style of honest men ! " sighs 
Sainte-Beuve, sick of such unreserved dis- 
closures ; "of men who have revered every- 
thing worthy of respect, whose innate feelings 
have ever been governed by the principles of 
good taste. Oh, for the polished, pure, and 
moderate writers ! " 

There is a pitiless French maxim, less pop- 
ular with English and Americans than with 
our Gallic neighbors, — " Le secret d'ennuyer 
est de tout dire." Mr. Pater indeed expresses 
the same thought in ampler English fashion 
(which but emphasizes the superiority of the 
French) when he says, " For in truth all art does 
but consist in the removal of surplusage, from 
the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing 
away the last particle of invisible dust, back 
to the earliest divination of the finished work 
to be, lying somewhere, according to Michel- 
angelo's fancy, in the rough-hewn block of 
stone." That the literary artist tests his skill 
by a masterly omission of all that is better 
left unsaid is a truth widely admitted and 
scantily utilized. Authors who have not 
taken the trouble de faire leur toilette admit 



126 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

us with painful frankness into their dressing- 
rooms, and suffer us to gaze more intimately 
than is agreeable to us upon the dubious 
mysteries of their deshabille. Authors who 
have the gift of continuity disregard with 
insistent generosity the limits of time and 
patience. What a noble poem was lost to 
myriads of readers when " The Ring and the 
Book " reached its twenty thousandth line ! 
How inexorable is the tyranny of a great and 
powerful poet who will spare his readers no- 
thing! Authors who are indifferent to the 
beauties of reserve charge down upon us with 
a dreadful impetuosity from which there is no 
escape. The strength that lies in delicacy, 
the chasteness of style which does not aban- 
don itself to every impulse, are qualities ill- 
understood by men who subordinate taste to 
fervor, and whose words, coarse, rank, or unc- 
tuous, betray the undisciplined intellect that 
mistakes passion for power. " The language 
of poets," says Shelley, " has always effected a 
certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of 
sound, without which it were not poetry ; " and 
it is the sustained effort to secure this bal- 
anced harmony, this magnificent work within 



WORDS. 127 

limits, which constitutes the achievement of 
the poet, and gives beauty and dignity to his 
art. " Where is the man who can flatter him- 
self that he knows the language of prose, if he 
has not assiduously practiced the language of 
poetry?" asks M. Francisque Sarcey, whose 
requirements are needlessly exacting, but 
whose views would have been cordially in- 
dorsed by at least one great master of English. 
Dryden always maintained that the admirable 
quality of his prose was due to his long train- 
ing in a somewhat mechanical verse. A more 
modern and diverting approximation of M. 
Sarcey's views may be found in the robust 
statement of Benjamin Franklin : "I ap- 
proved, for my part, the amusing one's self 
now and then with poetry, so far as to im- 
prove one's language, but no farther." It is 
a pity that people cannot always be born in 
the right generation ! What a delicious pic- 
ture is presented to our fancy of a nineteenth- 
century Franklin amusing himself and im- 
proving his language by an occasional study 
of " SordeUo " ! 

The absolute mastery of words, which is the 
prerogative of genius, can never be acquired 



128 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

by painstaking, or revealed to criticism. Mr. 
Lowell, pondering deeply on the subject, has 
devoted whole pages to a scholarly analysis of 
the causes which assisted Shakespeare to his 
unapproached and unapproachable vocabulary. 
The English language was then, Mr. Lowell 
reminds us, a living thing, " hot from the 
hearts and brains of a people ; not hardened 
yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of 
sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new 
thought. Shakespeare found words ready to 
his use, original and untarnished, types of 
thought whose edges were unworn by repeated 
impressions. . . . No arbitrary line had been 
drawn between high words and low ; vulgar 
then meant simply what was common ; poetry 
had not been aliened from the people by the 
establishment of an Tapper House of vocables. 
The conception of the poet had no time to cool 
while he was debating the comparative respec- 
tability of this phrase or that ; but he snatched 
what word his instinct prompted, and saw no 
indiscretion in making a king speak as his 
country nurse might have taught him." 

It is a curious thing, however, that the more 
we try to account for the miracles of genius, 



WORDS. 129 

the more miraculous they grow. We can 
never hope to understand the secret of Ho- 
mer's style. It is best to agree simply with 
Mr. Pater : " Homer was always saying things 
in this manner." We can never know how 
Keats came to write, 

" With beaded bubbles winking at the brim," 

or those other lines, perhaps the most beautiful 
in our language, 

" Magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 

It is all a mystery, hidden from the un- 
inspired, and Mr. Lowell's clean-built scaf- 
folding, while it helps us to a comprehensive 
enjoyment of Shakespeare, leaves us dumb 
and amazed as ever before the concentrated 
splendor of a single line, — 

" In cradle of the rude, imperious surge." 

There is only one way to fathom its concep- 
tion. The great waves reared their foamy 
heads, and whispered him the words. 

The richness of Elizabethan English, the 
freedom and delight with which men sounded 
and explored the charming intricacies of a 
tongue that was expanding daily into fresh 



130 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

majesty and beauty, must have given to litera- 
ture some of the allurements of navigation. 
Mariners sailed away upon stormy seas, on 
strange, half -hinted errands; haunted by the 
shadow of glory, dazzled by the lustre of 
wealth. Scholars ventured far upon the un- 
known ocean of letters ; haunted by the seduc- 
tions of prose, dazzled by the fairness of 
verse. They brought back curious spoils, 
gaudy, subtle, sumptuous, according to the 
taste or potency of the discoverer. Their 
words have often a mingled weight and sweet- 
ness, whether conveying briefly a single 
thought, like Burton's " touched with the 
loadstone of love," or adding strength and 
lustre to the ample delineations of Ben Jon- 
son. " Give me that wit whom praise ex- 
cites, glory puts on, or disgrace grieves ; he 
is to be nourished with ambition, pricked for- 
ward with honors, checked with reprehension, 
and never to be suspected of sloth." Bacon's 
admirable conciseness, in which nothing is 
disregarded, but where every word carries its 
proper value and expresses its exact signifi- 
cance, is equaled only by Cardinal Newman. 
" Reading maketh a full man, conference a 



WORDS. 131 

ready man, and study an exact man," says 
Bacon ; and this simple accuracy of definition 
reminds us inevitably of the lucid terseness 
with which every sentence of the " Apologia " 
reveals the thought it holds. " The truest 
expedience is to answer right out when you 
are asked ; the wisest economy is to have no 
management ; the best prudence is not to be a 
coward." As for the naivete and the pictur- 
esqueness which lend such inexpressible charm 
to the earlier writers and atone for so many of 
their misdeeds, what can be more agreeable 
than to hear Sir Walter Raleigh remark with 
cheerful ingenuousness, " Some of our cap- 
taines garoused of wine till they were reason- 
able pleasant " ! — a most engaging way of 
narrating a not altogether uncommon occur- 
rence. And what can be more winning to the 
ear than the simple grace with which Roger 
Ascham writes of familiar things : "In the 
whole year, Springtime, Summer, Fall of the 
Leaf, and Winter ; and in one day, Morning, 
Noontime, Afternoon, and Eventide, altereth 
the course of the weather, the pith of the bow, 
the strength of the man " ! It seems an easy 
thing to say " fall of the leaf " for fall, and 



132 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

" eventide " for evening, but in such easy 
things lies the subtle beauty of language ; in 
the rejection of such nice distinctions lies the 
barrenness of common speech. We can hardly 
spare the time, in these hurried days, to 
speak of the fall of the leaf, to use four words 
where one would suffice, merely because the 
four words have a graceful significance, and 
the one word has none ; and so, even in com- 
position, this finely colored phrase, with its 
hint of russet, wind-swept woods, is lost to us 
forever. Yet compare with it the line which 
Lord Tennyson, that great master of beauti- 
ful words, puts into Marian's song : — 

" ' Have you still any honey, my dear ? ' 
She said, ' It 's the fall of the year ; 
But come, come ! ' " 

How tame and gray is the idiom which con- 
veys a fact, which defines a season, but sug- 
gests nothing to our imaginations, by the side 
of the idiom which brings swiftly before our 
eyes the brilliant desolation of autumn ! 

The narrow vocabulary, which is the conver- 
sational freehold of people whose education 
should have provided them a broader field, 
admits of little that is picturesque or forcible, 



WORDS. 133 

and of less that is finely graded or delicately 
conceived. Ordinary conversation appears to 
consist mainly of " ands," "buts," and " thes," 
with an occasional " well " to give a flavor of 
nationality, a " yes " or " no " to stand for 
individual sentiment, and a few widely exag- 
gerated terms to destroy value and perspective. 
Is this, one wonders, the " treasure of dex- 
terous felicities " which Mr. Bagehot contem- 
plated with such delight, and which a critical 
society is destined to preserve flawless and 
uncontaminated ? Is this the "heroic utter- 
ance," the great " mother tongue," possessing 
which we all become — or so Mr. Sydney 
Dobell assures us — 

" Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare's soul, 
Sublime as Milton's immemorial theme, 
And rich as Chaucer's speech and fair as Spenser's dream " ? 

Is this the element whose beauty excites Mr. 
Oscar Wilde to such rapturous and finely 
worded praise, — praise which awakens in us 
a noble emulation to prove what we can 
accomplish with a medium at once so sump- 
tuous and so flexible ? " For the material that 
painter or sculptor uses is meagre in compari- 
son with language," says Mr. Wilde. " Words 



134 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

have not merely music as sweet as that of viol 
and lute, color as rich and vivid as any that 
makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian 
or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure 
and certain than that which reveals itself in 
marble or in bronze ; but thought and passion 
and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs 
indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised 
nothing but language, they would still have 
been the great art critics of the world. To 
know the principles of the highest art is to 
know the principles of all the arts." 

This is not claiming too much, for in truth 
Mr. Wilde is sufficiently well equipped to 
illustrate his claim. If his sentences are 
sometimes overloaded with ornament, the 
decorations are gold, not tinsel ; if his vocab- 
ulary is gorgeous, it is never glaring ; if his 
allusions are fanciful, they are controlled and 
subdued into moderation. Even the inev- 
itable and swiftly uttered reproach of " fine 
writing " cannot altogether blind us to the 
fact that his are beautiful words, — pearls 
and amethysts M. Gautier would call them, 
— aptly chosen, and fitted into place with 
the careful skill of a goldsmith. They are 



WORDS. _|^ 

free, moreover, from that vice of unexpect i 
ness which is part of fine writing, and w1tj c j 
Mr. Saintsbury finds so prevalent among tj ie 
literary workers of to-day ; the desire to su r _ 
prise ns by some new and profoundly • 
relevant application of a familiar word. The 
" veracity "of a bar of music, the finely exe- 
cuted " passage " of a marble chimney-piece, 
the " andante " of a sonnet, and the curious 
statement, commonly applied to Mr. Glad- 
stone, that he is " part of the conscience of 
a nation," — these are the vagaries which to 
Mr. Saintsbury, and to every other student 
of words, appear so manifestly discouraging. 
Mr. James Payn tells a pleasant story of an 
aesthetic sideboard which was described to 
him as having a Chippendale feeling about 
it, before which touching conceit the ever 
famous " fringes of the north star " pale into 
insignificance. A recent editor of Shelley's 
letters and essays says with seeming serious- 
ness in his preface that the " Witch of Atlas " 
is a " characteristic outcome," an " exquisite 
mouse of fancy brought forth hj what moun- 
tain of Shelley an imagination." Now, when 
a careful student and an appreciative reader 



13(> ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

caii bring himself to speak of a poem as a 
"mouse of fancy," merely for the sake of 
forcing a conceit, and confronting us with the 
perils of the unexpected, it is time we turned 
scberly back to first principles and to our dic- 
tionaries ; it is time we listened anew to M. 
Gautier's advice, and studied the value of 
words. 



ENNUI. 

" Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyenx." 

" Want and ennui," says Schopenhauer, 
" are the two poles of human life." The fur- 
ther we escaj)e from one evil, the nearer we 
inevitably draw to the other. As soon as the 
first rude pressure of necessity is relieved, and 
man has leisure to think of something beyond 
his unsatisfied craving for food and shelter, 
then ennui steps in and claims him for her 
own. It is the price he pays, not merely for 
luxury, but for comfort. Time, the inexorable 
taskmaster of poor humanity, drives us hard 
with whip and spur when we are struggling 
under the heavy burden of work ; but stays his 
hand, and prolongs the creeping hours, when 
we are delivered over to that weariness of 
spirit which weights each moment with lead. 
Time is, in fact, either our open oppressor or 
our false friend. He is that agent by which, 
at every instant, " all things in our hands 



138 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

become as nothing, and lose any real value 
they possess." 

Here is a doctrine distinctly discouraging, 
and stated with that relentless candor which 
compels our reluctant consideration. There 
can be no doubt that to Schopenhauer's mind 
ennui was an evil every whit as palpable as 
want. He hated and feared them both with 
the painful susceptibility of a self-centred 
man ; and he strove resolutely from his youth 
to protect himself against these twin disasters 
of life. The determined fashion in which he 
guarded his patrimony from loss resembled the 
determined fashion in which he strove — with 
less success — to guard himself from boredom. 
The vapid talk, the little wearisome iterations, 
which most of us bear resignedly enough be- 
cause custom has taught us patience, were to 
him intolerable afflictions. He retaliated by 
an ungracious dismissal of society as some- 
thing pitiably and uniformly contemptible. 
His advice has not the grave and simple wis- 
dom of Sir Thomas Browne, " Be able to be 
alone," but is founded rather on Voltaire's dis- 
dainful maxim, " The world is full of people 
who are not worth speaking to," and implies 



ENNUI. 139 

an almost savage rejection of one's fellow-be- 
ings. " Every fool is pathetically social," says 
Schopenhauer, and the advantage of solitude 
consists less in the possession of ourselves than 
in the escape from others. With whimsical 
eagerness he built barrier after barrier be- 
tween himself and the dreaded enemy, ennui, 
only to see his citadel repeatedly stormed, and 
to find himself at the mercy of his foe. There 
is but one method, after all, by which the in- 
vader can be even partially disarmed, and this 
method was foreign to Schopenhauer's nature. 
It was practiced habitually by Sir Walter 
Scott, who, in addition to his sustained and 
splendid work, threw himself with such unself- 
ish, unswerving ardor into the interests of 
his brother men that he never gave them a 
thorough chance to bore him. They did their 
part stoutly enough, and were doubtless as 
tiresome as they knew how to be ; but his in- 
vincible sweet temper triumphed over their 
malignity, and enabled Mm to say, in the even- 
ing of his life, that he had suffered little at 
their hands, and had seldom found any one 
from whom he could not extract either amuse- 
ment or edification. 



140 JESS AYS IN IDLENESS. 

Perhaps his journal tells a different tale, a 
tale of heavy moments stretching into hours, 
and borne with cheerful patience out of simple 
consideration for others. Men and women, 
friends and strangers, took forcible possession 
of his golden leisure, and he yielded it to them 
without a murmur. That which was well-nigh 
maddening to Carlyle's irritable nerves and 
selfish petulance, and which strained even 
Charles Lamb's forbearance to the snapping- 
point, Sir Walter endured smilingly, as if it 
were the most reasonable thing in the world. 
Mr. Lang is right when he says Scott did not 
preach socialism, he practiced it; that is, he 
never permitted himself to assign to his own 
comfort or convenience a very important place 
in existence ; he never supposed his own satis- 
faction to be the predestined purpose of the 
universe. But his love for genial life, his 
keen enjoyment of social pleasures, made him 
singularly sensitive to ennui. He was able, 
indeed, like Sir Thomas Browne, to be alone, 
— when the charity of his fellow-creatures 
suffered it, — and he delighted in diverting 
companionship, whether of peers or hinds ; but 
the weariness of daily intercourse with stupid 



ENNUL 141 

people told as heavily upon him as upon less 
patient victims. Little notes scattered through- 
out his journal reveal his misery, and awaken 
sympathetic echoes in every long-tried soul. 
" Of all bores," he writes, " the greatest is to 
hear a dull and bashful man sing a facetious 
song." And again, with humorous intensity: 
" Miss Ayton's father is a bore, after the fash- 
ion of all fathers, mothers, aunts, and other 
chaperons of pretty actresses." And again, 
this time in a hasty scrawl to Ballantyne : — 

" Oh, James ! oh, James ! two Irish dames 
Oppress me very sore : 
I groaning send one sheet I 've penned, 
For, hang them ! there 's no more." 

That Sir Walter forgot his sufferings as 
soon as they were over is proof, not of callous- 
ness, but of magnanimity. He forgave his tor- 
mentors the instant they ceased to torment 
him, and then found time to deplore his pre- 
vious irritation. " I might at least have asked 
him to dinner," he was heard murmuring self- 
reproachfully, when an unscrupulous intruder 
had at last departed from Abbotsf ord ; and 
on another occasion, when some impatient lads 
refused to emulate his forbearance, he recalled 



142 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

them with prompt insistence to their forgot- 
ten sense of propriety. " Come, come, young 
gentlemen," he expostulated. " It requires 
no small ability, I assure you, to be a decided 
bore. You must endeavor to show a little 
more respect." 

The self-inflicted pangs of ennui are less 
salutary and infinitely more onerous than those 
we suffer at the hands of others. It is natural 
that our just resentment when people weary us 
should result in a temporary taste for solitude, 
a temporary exaltation of our own society. 
Like most sentiments erected on an airy tres- 
tle-work of vanity, this is an agreeable delusion 
while it lasts ; but it seldom does last after we 
are bold enough to put it to the test. The in- 
evitable and rational discontent which lies at 
the bottom of our hearts is not a thing to be 
banished by noise, or lulled to sleep by silence. 
We are not sufficient for ourselves, and com- 
panionship is not sufficient for us. "Venez, 
monsieur," said Louis XIII. to a listless court- 
ier ; " allons nous ennuyer ensemble." We 
fancy it is the detail of life, its small griev- 
ances, its apparent monotony, its fretful cares, 
its hours alternately lagging and feverish, that 



ENNUI. 143 

wear out the joy of existence. This is not so. 
Were each day differently filled, the result 
would be much the same. Young Maurice de 
Guerin, struggling with, a depression he too 
clearly understands, strikes at the very root of 
the matter in one dejected sentence : " Mon 
Dieu, que je souffre de la vie ! Non dans ses 
accidents, un peu de philosophie y suffit ; mais 
dans elle-meme, dans sa substance, a part tout 
phenomene." To which the steadfast optimist 
opposes an admirable retort : "It is a pity 
that M. de Guerin should have permitted him- 
self this relentless analysis of a misery which 
is never bettered by contemplation." Happi- 
ness may not be, as we are sometimes told, the 
legacy of the barbarian, but neither is it a final 
outcome of civilization. Men can weary, and 
do weary, of every stage that represents a step 
in the world's progress, and the ennui of men- 
tal starvation is equaled only by the ennui of 
mental satiety. 

It is curious how much of this temper is 
reflected in the somewhat dispiriting literature 
which attains popularity to-day. Mr. Hamlin 
Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called — 
I think imf airly — " Main-Travelled Eoads" 



144 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

have deprived most of us of some cheerful 
hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life 
in which ennui sits enthroned. It is not the 
poverty of his Western farmers that oppresses 
us. Eeal biting poverty, which withers lesser 
evils with its deadly breath, is not known to 
these people at all. They have roofs, fire, 
food, and clothing.' It is not the ceaseless 
labor, the rough fare, the gray skies, the 
muddy barnyards, which stand for the trouble 
in their lives. It is the dreadful weariness of 
living. It is the burden of a dull existence, 
clogged at every pore, and the hopeless mel- 
ancholy of which they have sufficient intelli- 
gence to understand. Theirs is the ennui of 
emptiness, and the implied reproach on every 
page is that a portion, and only a portion, 
of mankind is doomed to walk along these 
shaded paths ; while happier mortals who 
abide in New York, or perhaps in Paris, spend 
their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual 
and artistic excitation. The clearest denial of 
this fallacy may be found in that matchless 
and desolate sketch of Mr. Pater's called " Se- 
bastian van Storck," where we have painted for 
us with penetrating distinctness man's delib- 



ENNUI. 145 

erate rejection of those crowded accessories 
which, to the empty-handed, represent the joys 
of life. Never has the undying essence of 
ennui been revealed to our unwilling gaze as 
in this merciless picture. Never has it been 
so portrayed in its awful nakedness, amid a 
plenty which it cannot be persuaded to share. 
We see the rich, warm, highly colored sur- 
roundings, the vehement intensity of work and 
pastime, the artistic completeness of every 
detail, the solicitations of love, the delicate and 
alluring touches which give to every day its 
separate delight, its individual value ; and, 
amid all these things, the impatient soul striv- 
ing vainly to adjust itself to a life wdiich seems 
so worth the living. Here, indeed, is one of 
"Fortune's favorites," whom she decks with 
garlands like a sacrificial heifer, and at whom, 
unseen, she points her mocking finger. En- 
compassed from childhood by the " thriving 
genius " of the Dutch, by the restless activity 
which made dry land and populous towns 
where nature had willed the sea, and by the 
admirable art which added each year to the 
heaped-up treasures of Holland, Sebastian 
van Storck has but one vital impulse which 



146 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

shapes itself to an end, — escape ; escape from 
an existence niade unendurable by its stifling 
fullness, its vivid and marvelous accomplish- 
ment. 

It is an interesting question to determine, 
or to endeavor to determine, how far animals 
share man's melancholy capacity for ennui. 
Schopenhauer, who, like Hartmann and all 
other professional pessimists, steadfastly main- 
tains that beasts are happier than men, is dis- 
posed to believe that in their natural state 
they never suffer from this malady, and that, 
even when domesticated, only the most intelli- 
gent give any indication of its presence. But 
how does Schopenhauer know that which he so 
confidently affirms ? The bird, impelled by an 
instinct she is powerless to resist, sits patiently 
on her eggs until they are hatched ; but who 
can say she is not weary of the pastime ? What 
loneliness and discontent may find expression 
in the lion's dreadful roar, which is said to be 
as mournful as it is terrible ! We are nat- 
urally tempted, in moments of fretfulness and 
dejection, to seek relief — not unmixed with 
envy — in con tern plating with Sir Thomas 
Browne " the happiness of inferior creatures 



ENNUI. 147 

who in tranquillity possess their constitutions." 

But freedom from care, and from the apprehen- 
sion that is worse than care, does not neces- 
sarily iniply freedom from all disagreeable 
sensations ; and the surest claim of the brute 
to satisfaction, its absolute adequacy to the 
place it is designed to fill, is destroyed by our 
interference in its behalf. As a result, domes- 
tic pets reveal plainly to every close observer 
how frequently they suffer from ennui. They 
pay, in smaller coin, the same price that man 
pays for comfortable living. Mr. Ruskin has 
written with ready sympathy of the house dog, 
who bears resignedly long hours of dull inac- 
tion, and only shows by his frantic delight 
what a relief it is to be taken out for the mild 
dissipation of a stroll. I have myself watched 
and pitied the too evident ennui of my cat, 
poor little beast of prey, deprived in a mouse- 
less home of the supreme pleasures of the 
hunt ; fed until dinner ceases to be a coveted 
erijoyment ; housed, cushioned, combed, ca- 
ressed, and forced to bear upon her pretty 
shoulders the burden of a wearisome opulence, 
— or what represents opulence to a pussy. I 
have seen Agrippina listlessly moving from 



148 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

chair to chair, and from sofa to sofa, in a vain 
attempt to nap ; looking for a few languid 
minutes out of the window with the air of a 
great lady sadly bored at the play ; and then 
turning dejectedly back into the room whose 
attractions she had long since exhausted. Her 
expressive eyes lifted to mine betrayed her dis- 
content ; the lassitude of an irksome luxury 
unnerved her graceful limbs ; if she could have 
spoken, it would have been to complain with 
Charles Lamb of that " dumb, sopor ifical good- 
for-nothingness " which clogs the wheels of 
life. 

It is a pleasant fancy, baseless and proof- 
less, which makes us imagine the existence of 
fishes to be peculiarly tranquil and unmolested. 
The element in which they live appears to 
shelter them from so many evils ; noises es- 
pecially, and the sharpness of sudden change, 
scorching heats, and the inclement skies of 
winter. A delightful mystery wraps them 
round, and the smooth apathy with which they 
glide through the water suggests content ap- 
proaching to complacency. That old-fashioned 
poem beginning 

" Deep in the wave is a coral grove, 
Where the purple mullet and goldfish rove," 



ENNUI. 149 

filled my childish heart with a profound envy 
of these happy creatures, which was greatly 
increased by reading a curious story of Father 
Faber's, called " The Melancholy Heart." In 
this tale, a little ship wrecked girl is carried to 
the depths of the ocean, and sees the green sea 
swinging to and fro because it is so full of joy, 
and the fishes waving their glistening fins in 
silent satisfaction, and the oysters opening and 
shutting their shells in lazy raptures of delight. 
Afterwards she visits the birds and beasts and 
insects, and finds amongst them intelligence, 
industry, patience, ingenuity, — a whole host 
of admirable qualities, — but nowhere else the 
sweet contentment of that dumb watery life. 
So universal is this fallible sentiment that 
even Leopardi, while assigning to all created 
things their full share of pain, reluctantly ad- 
mits that the passive serenity of the less viva- 
cious creatures of the sea — starfish and their 
numerous brothers and sisters — is the nearest 
possible approach to an utterly impossible 
happiness. And indeed it is difficult to look 
at a sea-urchin slowly moving its countless 
spines in the clear shallow water without 
thinking that here, at least, is an existence 



150 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

equally free from excitability and from ennui ; 
here is a state of being sufficient for itself, 
and embracing all the enjoyment it can hold. 
The other side of the story is presented when 
we discover the little prickly cup lying empty 
and dry on the peak of a neighboring rock, 
and know that a crow's sharp beak has relent- 
lessly dug the poor urchin from its comfortable 
cradle, and ended its slumbrous felicity. Yet 
the sudden cessation of life has nothing what- 
ever to do with its reasonable contentment. 
The question is, not how soon is it over, or how 
does it come to an end, but is it worth living 
while it lasts ? Moreover, the chances of death 
make the sweetness of self-preservation; and 
this is precisely the sentiment which Leigh 
Hunt has so admirably embodied in those lines 
— the finest, I think, he ever wrote — where 
the fish pleads for its own pleasant and satis- 
factory existence : — 

" A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves, 
Quickened with touches of transporting fear." 

Here, as elsewhere, fear is the best antidote 
for ennui. The early settlers of America, sur- 
rounded by hostile Indians, and doubtful each 
morning whether the coming nightfall would 



ENNUI. 151 

not see their rude homes given to the flames, 
probably suffered but little from the dullness 
which seems so oppressive to the peaceful agri- 
culturist of to-day. The mediaeval women, who 
were content to pass their time in weaving 
endless tapestries, had less chance to complain 
of the monotony of life than their artistic, 
scientific, literaiy, and philanthropic sisters of 
our age ; for at any hour, breaking in upon 
their tranquil labors, might be heard the 
trumpet's blast ; at any hour might come the 
tidings, good or bad, which meant a few more 
years of security, or the horrors of siege and 
pillage. 

It is pleasant to turn our consideration from 
the ennui which is inevitable, and consequently 
tragic, to the ennui which is accidental, and 
consequently diverting. The first is part of 
ourselves, from which there is no escape ; the 
second is, as a rule, the contribution of our 
neighbors, and may be eluded if fortune and 
our ow r n wits favor us. Lord Byron, for ex- 
ample, finding himself hard beset by Madame 
de Stael, whom he abhorred, had the dexterity 
to entrap poor little " Monk " Lewis into the 
conversation, and then slipped away from both, 



152 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

leaving them the dismally congenial task of 
wearying each other without mercy. "A bore," 
says Bishop Selwyn, "is a man who will persist 
in talking about himself when you want to talk 
about yourself ; " and this simple explanation 
offers a satisfactory solution of much of the 
ennui suffered in society. People with theories 
of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their 
kind, for no time or place is sacred from their 
devastating elucidations. A theoretic social- 
ist — not the practical working kind, like Sir 
Walter — is adamant to the fatigue of his lis- 
teners. " Eloquence," says Mr. Lowell feel- 
ingly, "has no bowels for its victims;" and 
one of the most pathetic figures in the history 
of literature is poor Heine, awakened from his 
sweet morning nap by Ludwig Borne, who sat 
relentlessly on the edge of the bed and talked 
patriotism. I hardly think that even this wan- 
ton injury justified Heine in his cruel attack 
upon Borne, when the latter was dead and 
could offer no defense ; yet who knows how 
many drops of concentrated bitterness were 
stored up in those dreary moments of bore- 
dom ! The only other instance of ennui which 
seems as grievous and as cruel is the picture 



ENNUI. 153 

of the Baron Fouque's brilliant wife con- 
demned to play loto every evening with the 
officers of the victorious French army ; an 
illustration equally novel and malign of the 
devastating inhumanity of war. 

In fact, amusements which do not amuse are 
among the most depressing of earthly evils. 
When Sir George Cornwall Lewis candidly 
confessed that life would be tolerable were it 
not for its pleasures, he had little notion that 
he was uttering a witticism fated to enjoy 
a melancholy immortality. His protest was 
purely personal, and society, prompt to recog- 
nize a grievance when it is presented, has gone 
on ever since peevishly and monotonously echo- 
ing his lament. We crave diversion so eagerly, 
we need it so sorely, that our disappointment 
in its elusiveness is fed by the Bickerings of 
perpetual hope. Ennui has been denned as a 
desire for activity without the capacity for ac- 
tion, as a state of inertia quickened by discon- 
tent. But it is rather a desire for amusement 
than for activity ; it is a rational instinct 
warped by the irony of circumstances, and by 
our own selfish limitations. It was not activ- 
ity that Schopenhauer lacked. He worked 



154 ESS ATS IN IDLENESS, 

hard all his life, and with the concentrated 
industry of a man who knew exactly what 
he wanted to do. It was the common need of 
enjoyment, which he shared with the rest of 
mankind, and his own singular incapacity for 
enjoying himself, which chafed him into bitter- 
ness, and made him so unreasonably angry with 
the world. " In human existence," says Leo- 
pardi, " the intervals between pleasure and 
pain are occupied by ennui. And since all 
pleasures are like cobwebs, exceedingly fragile, 
thin, and transparent, ennui penetrates their 
tissue and saturates them, just as air pene- 
trates the webs. It is, indeed, nothing but a 
yearning for happiness, without the illusion of 
pleasure or the reality of pain. This yearning 
is never satisfied, since true happiness does not 
exist. So that life is interwoven with weariness 
and suffering, and one of these evils disap- 
pears only to give place to the other. Such is 
the destiny of man." 

Now, to endure pain resolutely, courage is 
required ; to endure ennui, one must be bred 
to the task. The restraints of a purely arti- 
ficial society are sufferable to those only whom 
custom has rendered docile, and who have been 



ENNUI. 155 

trained to subordinate their own impulses and 
desires. The more elaborate the social con- 
ditions, the more relentless this need of adjust- 
ment, which makes a harmonious whole at 
the cost of individual development. We all 
know how, when poor Frances Burney was 
lifted suddenly from the cheerful freedom of 
middle-class life to the wearisome etiquette of 
a court, she drooped and fretted under the bur- 
den of an honor which brought her nothing 
but vexation. Macaulay, who champions her 
cause with burning zeal, is pleased to repre- 
sent the monotony of court as simple slavery 
with no extenuating circumstances. He likens 
Dr. Burney conducting his daughter to the 
palace to a Circassian father selling his own 
child into bondage. The sight of the authoress 
of " Evelina " assisting at the queen's toilet, or 
chatting sleepily with the ladies in waiting, 
thrills him with indignation ; the thought of 
her playing cards night after night with 
Madame Schwellenberg reduces him to de- 
spair. And indeed, card-playing, if you have 
not the grace to like it, is the most unprofit- 
able form of social martyrdom ; you suffer 
horribly yourself, and you add very little to 



156 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

the pleasure of your neighbor. The Baroness 
Fouque may have conquered the infantine im- 
becilities of loto with no great mental exhaus- 
tion. If she were painfully bored, her patience 
alone was taxed. The Frenchmen probably 
thought her a pleased and animated com- 
panion. But Miss Burney, delicate, sleepy, 
fatigued, loathing cards, and inwardly re- 
bellious at her fate, must have made the game 
drag sadly before bedtime. It was a dreary 
waste of moments for her ; but a less intoler- 
ant partisan than Macaulay would have some 
sympathy to spare for poor Madame Schwel- 
lenberg, who, like most women of rank, adored 
the popular j)astime, and who doubtless found 
the distinguished young novelist a very unsat- 
isfactory associate. 

It is salutary to turn from Miss Burney and 
her wrathful historian to the letters of Char- 
lotte Elizabeth, mother of the Regent d'Or- 
leans, and see how the oppressive monotony of 
the French court was cheerfully endured for 
fifty years by a woman exiled from home and 
kindred, whose pleasures were few, whose an- 
noyances were manifold. Madame would have 
enjoyed nothing better than a bowl of beer, 



ENNUI. 157 

soup, or a dish of sausages eaten in congenial 
company. She lunched daily alone, on hated 
French messes, stared at by twenty footmen, 
from whose supercilious eyes she was glad to 
escape with hunger still unsatisfied. Madame 
detested sermons. She listened to them end- 
lessly without complaint, and was grateful for 
the occasional privilege of a nap. Madanie 
liked cards. She was not permitted to play, 
nor even to show herself at the lansquenet 
table. She never gambled, — in fact, she had 
no money, — and it was a fancy of her hus- 
band's that she brought him ill luck by hover- 
ing near. Neither was she allowed to retire. 
" All the old women who do not play have to 
be entertained by me," she writes with sur- 
passing good humor. " This goes on from 
seven to ten, and makes me yawn frightfully." 
Supper was eaten at the royal table, where the 
guests often waited three quarters of an hour 
for the king to appear, and where nobody 
spoke a word during the meal. " I live as 
though I were quite alone in the world," con- 
fesses this friendless exile to her favorite 
correspondent, the Eaugravine Louise. " But 
I am resigned to such a state of things, and 



158 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

I meddle in nothing." Here was a woman 
trained to the endurance of ennui. The theatre 
and the chase were her sole amusements ; let- 
ter-writing was her only occupation. Her 
healthy German nature had in it no trace of 
languor, no bitterness born of useless rebellion 
against fate. She knew how to accept the in- 
evitable, and how to enjoy the accidental ; and 
this double philosophy afforded her something 
closely resembling content. Napoleon, it is 
said, once desired some comedians to play 
at court, and M. de Talleyrand gravely an- 
nounced to the audience waiting to hear them, 
" Gentlemen, the emperor earnestly requests 
you to be amused." Had Charlotte Elizabeth 
— long before laid to sleep in St. Denis — 
been one of that patient group, she would have 
literally obeyed the royal commands. She 
would have responded with prompt docility to 
any offered entertainment. This is not an easy 
task. " Amuse me, if you can find out how to 
do it," was the melancholy direction of Riche- 
lieu to Boisrobert, when the pains of ennui 
grew unbearable, and even kittens ceased to 
be diverting. Amuse ! amuse ! amuse ! is the 
plea of a weariness as wide as the world, and 



ENNUI. 159 

as old as humanity. Amuse me for a little 

while, that I may think I have escaped from 

myself. 

It is curious that England should have to 

borrow from France the word " ennui," while 

the French are unanimous in their opinion that 

the thing itself is emphatically of English 

growth. The old rhyme, 

" Jean Rosbif ^cuyer, 
Qui pendit soi-meme pour se de'semrayer," 

has never lost its application, though the pres- 
ent generation of English-sj)eaking men are 
able to digest a great deal of dullness without 
seeking such violent forms of relief. In fact, 
Mr. Oscar Wilde, prompt to offer an unwel- 
come criticism, explains the amazing popu- 
larity of the psychological and religiously 
irreligious novel on the ground that the genre 
ennuyeux, which no Frenchman can bring 
himself to pardon, is the one form of litera- 
ture which his countrymen thoroughly enjoy. 
They have a kindly tolerance for stupid people 
as well, and the ill-natured term " bore " has 
only forced itself of late years upon an urbane 
and long-suffering public. Johnson's diction- 
ary is innocent of the word, though Johnson 



160 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

himself was well acquainted with the article. 
As late as 1822, a reviewer in " Colburn's 
Magazine " entreats his readers to use the word 
" bore ; " to write it, if they please ; to print 
it, even, if necessary. Why shrink from 
the expression, when the creature itself is so 
common, and " daily gaining ground in the 
country " ? 

Before this date, however, one English 
writer had given to literature some priceless 
illustrations of the species. " Could we but 
study our bores as Miss Austen must have 
studied hers in her country village," says 
Mrs. Ritchie, " what a delightful world this 
might be ! " But I seriously doubt whether 
any real enjoyment could be extracted from 
Miss Bates, or Mr. Rushworth, or Sir William 
Lucas, in the flesh. If we knew them, we 
should probably feel precisely as did Emma 
Woodhouse, and Maria Bertram, and Elizabeth 
Bennet, — vastly weary of their company. 
In fact, only their brief appearances make 
the two gentlemen bores so diverting, even in 
fiction ; and Miss Bates, I must confess, taxes 
my patience sorely. She is so tiresome that 
she tires, and I am invariably tempted to do 



ENNUI. 161 

what lier less fortunate townspeople would have 
gladly done, — run away from her to more 
congenial society. Surely comedy ceases, and 
tragedy begins, when poor Jane Fairfax es- 
capes from the strawberry party at Donwell, 
and seeks, under the burning noonday sun, 
the blessed relief of solitude. " We all know 
at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. 
Mine, I admit, are exhausted," is the confes- 
sion wrung from the silent lips of a girl who 
has borne all that human nature can bear 
from Miss Bates's affectionate solicitude. Per- 
haps the best word ever spoken upon the cre- 
ation of such characters in novels comes from 
Cardinal Newman. " It is very difficult," he 
says, " to delineate a bore in a narrative, for 
the simple reason that he is a bore. A tale 
must aim at condensation, but a bore acts in 
solution. It is only in the long run that he 
is ascertained." And when he is ascertained, 
and his identity established beyond reach of 
doubt, what profit have we in his desolating 
perfections? Miss Austen was far from en- 
joying the dull people whom she knew in life. 
We have the testimony of her letters to this 
effect. Has not Mrs. Stent, otherwise lost to 



162 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

fame, been crowned with direful immortality 
as the woman who bored Jane Austen? " We 
may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves," she 
writes, with facile self-reproach at her impa- 
tience, " unequal to anything, and unwelcome 
to anybody ; " an apprehension manifestly 
manufactured out of nothingness to strengthen 
some wavering purpose of amendment. Stu- 
pidity is acknowledged to be the one natural 
gift which cannot be cultivated, and Miss 
Austen well knew it lay beyond her grasp. 
With as much sincerity could Emma Wood- 
house have said, " I may come in time to be a 
second Miss Bates." 

There is a small, compact, and enviable mi- 
nority among us, who, through no merit of 
their own, are incapable of being bored, and 
consequently escape the endless pangs of en- 
nui. They are so clearly recognized as a body 
that a great deal of the world's work is pre- 
pared especially for their entertainment and 
instruction. Books are written for them, ser- 
mons are preached to them, lectures are given 
to them, papers are read to them, societies 
and clubs are organized for them, discussions 
after the order of Melchizedek are carried on 



ENNUI. 163 

monotonously in their behalf. A brand new 
school of fiction has been invented for their 
exclusive diversion ; and several complicated 
systems of religion have been put together for 
their recent edification. It is hardly a matter 
of surprise that, fed on such meats, they 
should wax scornful, and deride their hungry 
fellow-creatures. It is even less amazing that 
these fellow-creatures should weary from time 
to time of the crumbs that fall from their 
table. It is told of Pliny the younger that, 
being invited to a dinner, he consented to come 
on the express condition that the conversation 
should abound in Socratic discourses. Here 
was a man equally insensible to ennui and to 
the sufferings of others. The guests at that 
ill-starred banquet appear to have been sacri- 
ficed as ruthlessly as the fish and game they 
ate. They had not even the loophole of escape 
which Mr. Bagehot contemplates so admir- 
ingly in Paradise Lost. Whenever Adam's 
remarks expand too obviously into a sermon, 
Eve, in the most discreet and wife-like manner, 
steps softly away, and refreshes herself with 
slumber. Indeed, when we come to think of 
it, conversation between these two must have 



164 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

been difficult at times, because they had no- 
body to talk about. If we exiled our neigh- 
bors permanently from our discussions, we 
should soon be reduced to silence ; and if we 
confined ourselves even to laudatory remarks, 
we should probably say but little. Miss Fran- 
ces Power Cobbe, who is uncompromisingly 
hostile to the feeble vices of society, insists 
that it is the duty of every woman to look 
bored when she hears a piece of scandal ; but 
this mandate is hardly in accord with Miss 
Cobbe's other requisite for true womanhood, 
absolute and undeviating sincerity. How can 
she look bored when she does not feel bored, 
unless she plays the hypocrite? And while 
many women are shocked and repelled by 
scandal, few, alas ! are wont to find it tire- 
some. I have not even observed any exceed- 
ing weariness in men when subjected to a 
similar ordeal. In that pitiless dialogue of 
Landor's between Catherine of Russia and 
Princess Dashkov, we find some opinions on 
this subject stated with appalling candor. 
" Believe me,' 9 says the empress, " there is 
nothing so delightful in life as to find a liar in 
a person of repute. Have you never heard 



ENNUI. 165 

good folks rejoicing at it ? Or rather, can you 
mention to me any one who has not been in 
raptures when he could communicate such 
glad tidings ? The goutiest man would go on 
foot to tell his friend of it at midnight ; and 
would cross the Neva for the purpose, when 
he doubted whether the ice would bear him." 
Here, indeed, is the very soul and essence of 
ennui ; not the virtuous sentiment which re- 
volts at the disclosure of another's faults, but 
that deep and deadly ennui of life which wel- 
comes evil as a distraction. The same selfish 
lassitude which made the gladiatorial combats 
a pleasant sight for the jaded eyes which wit- 
nessed them finds relief for its tediousness to- 
day in the swift destruction of confidence and 
reputation. 

There is a curious and melancholy fable of 
Leopardi's in which he seeks to explain what 
always puzzled him sorely, the continued en- 
durance of life. In the beginning, he says, 
the gods gave to men an existence without 
care, and an earth without evil. The world 
was small, and easily traversed. No seas di- 
vided it, no mountains rose frowning from its 
bosom, no extremes of heat or cold afflicted 



166 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

its inhabitants. Their wants were supplied, 
their pleasures provided ; their happiness, Jove 
thought, assured. For a time all things went 
well ; but as the human race outgrew its 
infancy, it tired of this smooth perfection, 
and little by little there dawned upon men the 
inherent worthlessness of life. Every day 
they sounded its depths more clearly, and 
every day they wearied afresh of all they 
knew and were. Illusions vanished, and the 
insupportable pains of ennui forced them to 
cast aside a gift in which they found no value. 
They desired death, and sought it at their own 
hands. 

Then Jove, half in wrath and half in pity, 
devised a means by which his rebellious crea- 
tures might be preserved. He enlarged the 
earth, moulded the mountains, and poured into 
mighty hollows the restless and pitiless seas. 
Burning heat and icy cold he sent, diseases 
and dangers of every kind, craving desires 
that could never be satisfied, vain ambitions, a 
babble of many tongues, and the deep-rooted 
animosities of nations. Gone was the old 
tranquillity, vanished the old ennui. A new 
race, struggling amid terrible hardships, fought 



ENNUI. 167 

bravely and bitterly for the preservation of an 
existence they had formerly despised. Man 
found his life rilled with toil, sweetened by 
peril, checked by manifold disasters, and was 
deluded into cherishing at any cost that which 
was so painful to sustain. The greater the 
difficulties and dangers, the more he opposed 
to them his own indomitable purpose, the more 
determined he was to live. The zest of per- 
petual effort, the keenness of contention, the 
brief, sweet triumph over adversity, — these 
left him neither the time nor the disposition 
to question the value of all that he wrung 
from fate. 

It is a cheerless philosophy, but not without 
value to the sanguine socialist of to-day, who 
dreams of preparing for all of us a lifetime of 
unbroken ennui. 



WIT AND HUMOR. 

It is dubious wisdom to walk in the foot- 
prints of a giant, and to stumble with little 
steps along the road where his great strides 
were taken. Yet many years have passed 
since Hazlitt trod this way ; fresh flowers have 
grown by the route, and fresh weeds have 
fought with them for mastery. The face of 
the country has changed for better or for 
worse, and a brief survey reveals much that 
never met his eyes. The journey, too, was 
safer in his day than in ours; and while he 
gathers and analyzes every species of wit and 
humor, it plainly does not occur to him for a 
moment that either calls for any protection at 
his hands. Hazlitt is so sure that laughter is 
our inalienable right, that he takes no pains 
to soften its cadences or to justify its mirth. 
" We laugh at that in others which is a serious 
matter to ourselves," he says, and sees no 
reason why this should not be. " Some one is 



WIT AND HUMOR, 169 

generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke ; " 
and, fortified with this assurance, he confesses 
to a frank delight in the comic parts of the 
Arabian Nights, although recognizing keenly 
the spirit of cruelty that underlies them, and 
aware that they " carry the principle of callous 
indifference in a jest as far as it can go." 
Don Quixote, too, he stoutly affirms to be as 
fitting a subject for merriment as Sancho 
Panza. Both are laughable, and both are 
meant to be laughed at ; the extravagances of 
each being pitted dexterously against those of 
the. other by a great artist in the ridiculous. 
But he is by no means insensible to the charm 
and goodness of the " ingenious gentleman ; " 
for sympathy is the legitimate attribute of 
humor, and even where the humorist seems 
most pitiless, and even brutal, in his apprehen- 
sion of the absurd, he has a living tenderness 
for our poor humanity which is so rich in its 
absurdities. 

Hazlitt's definition of wit and humor is per- 
haps as good as any definition is ever likely to 
be ; that is, it expresses a half-truth with a 
great deal of reasonableness and accuracy. 
"Humor," he says, "is the describing the 



170 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

ludicrous as it is in itself ; wit is the exposing 
it by comparing or contrasting it with some- 
thing else. Humor is the growth of nature 
and accident; wit is the product of art and 
fancy. Humor, as it is shown in books, is an 
imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities 
of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, 
situation, and character ; wit is the illustrating 
and heightening the sense of that absurdity by 
some sudden and unexpected likeness or oppo- 
sition of one thing to another, which sets off 
the quality we laugh at or despise in a still 
more contemptible or striking point of view." 
This is perhaps enough to show us at least 
one cause of the endless triumph of humor over 
wit, — a triumph due to its closer affinity with 
the simple and elementary conditions of human 
nature and life. Wit is artificial; humor is 
natural. Wit is accidental ; humor is inevi- 
table. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, 
of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be 
expressed only in language ; humor can be 
developed sufficiently in situation. Wit is the 
plaything of the intellectual, or the weapon of 
nimble minds ; humor is the possession of all 
sorts and conditions of men. Wit is truly 



WIT AND HUMOR. 171 

what Shelley falsely imagined virtue to be, 
" a refinement of civilized life ; " humor is the 
property of all races in every stage of develop- 
ment. Wit possesses a species of immortality, 
and for many generations holds its own; 
humor is truly immortal, and as long as the 
eye sees, and the ear hears, and the heart 
beats, it will be our privilege to laugh at the 
pleasant absurdities which require no other 
seed or nurture than man's endless intercourse 
with man. 

Nevertheless, an understanding of the differ- 
ences in nations and in epochs helps us to the 
enjoyment of many humorous situations. We 
should know something of England and of 
India to appreciate the peculiar horror with 
which Lord Minto, on reaching Calcutta, be- 
held the fourteen male attendants wdio stood 
in his chamber, respectfully prepared to help 
him into bed ; or his still greater dismay at 
being presented by the rajah of Bali with 
seven slaves, — five little boys and two little 
girls, — all of whom cost the conscientious 
governor-general a deal of trouble and expense 
before they w r ere properly disposed of, and in a 
fair way to learn their alphabet and catechism. 



172 ASSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

Yet perhaps a deeper knowledge of time and 
character is needed to sound the depths of Sir 
Robert Walpole's cynical observation, " Grati- 
tude is a lively sense of future favors ; " al- 
though this is indeed a type of witticism which 
possesses inherent vitality, not depending upon 
any play of words or double meanings, but 
striking deep root into the fundamental fail- 
ings of the human heart. 

It is in its simplest forms, however, that 
humor enjoys a world-wide actuality, and is 
the connecting link of all times and places and 
people. " Let us start from laughter," says M. 
Edmond Scherer, " since laughter is a thing 
familiar to every one. It is excited by a sense 
of the ridiculous, and the ridiculous arises 
from the contradiction between the use of a 
thing and its intention." Even that common- 
est of all themes, a fellow-creature slipping or 
falling, M. Scherer holds to be provocative of 
mirth ; and in selecting this elementary ex- 
ample he bravely drives the matter back to its 
earliest and rudest principles. For it is a 
weapon in the hands of the serious that such 
casualties, which should excite instant sym- 
pathy and alarm, awaken laughter only in 



WIT AND HUMOR. 173 

those who are too foolish or too brutal to ex- 
perience any other sensation. It would seem, 
indeed, that the sight of a man falling on the 
ice or in the mud cannot be, and ought not to 
be, very amusing. But before we frown se- 
verely and forever upon such vulgar jests, let 
us turn for a moment to a well-known essay, 
and see what Charles Lamb has to plead in 
their extenuation : — 

"I am by nature extremely susceptible of 
street affronts ; the jeers and taunts of the 
populace; the low-bred triumph they display 
over the casual trip or splashed stocking of a 
gentleman. Yet I can endure the jocularity 
of a young sweep with something more than 
forgiveness. In the last winter but one, pacing 
along Cheapside with my accustomed precipi- 
tation when I walk westward, a treacherous 
slide brought me upon my back in an instant. 
I scrambled up with pain and shame enough, 
— yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if 
nothing had happened, — when the roguish 
grin of one of these young wits encountered 
me. There he stood, pointing me out with his 
dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman 
(I suppose his mother) in particular, till the 



174 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he 
thought it) worked themselves out at the cor- 
ners of his poor red eyes, red from many a pre- 
vious weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling 
through all with such a joy, snatched out of 
desolation, that Hogarth — but Hogarth has 
got him already (how could he miss him ?) in 
the March to Finchley, grinning at the pieman ; 

— there he stood, as he stands in the picture, 
irremovable, as if the jest was to last forever, 
with such a maximum of glee and minimum 
of mischief in his mirth — for the grin of a 
genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it 

— that I could have been content, if the honor 
of a gentleman might endure it, to have re- 
mained his butt and his mockery till mid- 
night." 

Ah, prince of kindly humorists, to whom 
shall we go but to you for tears and laughter, 
and pastime and sympathy, and jests and 
gentle tolerance, and all things needed to make 
light our trouble-burdened hearts ! 

It is not worth while to deny or even to 
soften the cruel side of humor, though it is a 
far more grievous error to overlook its gener- 
ous forbearance. The humorist's view of life 



WIT AND HUMOR. 175 

is essentially genial; but lie has given stout 
blows in his clay, and the sound of his vigorous 
warfare rings harshly in our unaccustomed 
ears. " The old giants of English fun " were 
neither soft-spoken nor soft-handed gentry, 
and it seems to us now and then as if they 
laid about them with joyous and indiscriminate 
activity. Even Dickens, the last and greatest 
of his race, and haunted often to his fall by 
the beckoning of mirthless modern phantoms, 
shows in his earlier work a good deal of this 
gleeful and unhesitating belligerency. The 
scenes between old Weller and Mr. Stiggins 
might be successfully acted in a spirited 
puppet-show, where conversation is of less 
importance than well-timed and well-bestowed 
pommeling. But we have now reached that 
point of humane seriousness when even puppet- 
shows cannot escape their educational respon- 
sibilities, and when Punch and Judy are 
gravely censured for teaching a lesson in bru- 
tality. The laughter of generations, which 
should protect and hallow the little manikins 
at play, counts for nothing by the side of their 
irresponsible naughtiness, and their cheerful 
disregard of all our moral standards. Yet 



176 £SSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

here, too, Hazlitt has a seasonable word of 
defense, holding indeed that he who invented 
such diverting pastimes was a benefactor to 
his species, and gave us something which it 
was rational and healthy to enjoy. " We place 
the mirth and glee and triumph to our own 
account," he says, " and we know that the 
bangs and blows the actors have received go 
for nothing as soon as the showman puts them 
up in his box, and marches off quietly with 
them, as jugglers of a less amusing description 
sometimes march off with the wrongs and 
rights of mankind in their pockets." It has 
been well said that wit requires a good head ; 
humor, a good heart; and fun, high spirits. 
Punch's spirits, let us hasten to admit, are 
considerably in advance of his head and heart ; 
yet nevertheless he is wanting neither in 
acuteness nor in the spirit of good-fellowship. 
He has hearkened to the advice given by 
Seneca many years ago, "Jest without bit- 
terness " ! and has practiced this delightful 
accomplishment for centuries, as befits the 
most conservative joker in the world. 

Another reproach urged against humor 
rather than wit is its somewhat complicated 



W IT AND HUMOR. Ill 

system of lying ; and much well-merited sever- 
ity lias been expended upon such questionable 
diversions as hoaxing, quizzing, " selling," and 
other variations of the game, the titles of 
which have long since passed away, leaving 
their substance behind them. It would be 
easy, but untrue, to say that real humor has 
nothing whatever to do with these unworthy 
offshoots, and never encourages their growth. 
The fact remains that they spring from a great 
humorous principle, and one which critics have 
been prompt to recognize, and to embody in 
language as clear and unmistakable as possible. 
"Lying," says Hazlitt, "is a species of wit 
and humor. To lay anything to a person's 
charge from which he is perfectly free shows 
spirit and invention ; and the more incredible 
the effrontery the greater is the joke." " The 
terrors of Sancho," observes M. Scherer, " the 
rascalities of Scapin, the brags of Falstaff, 
amuse us because of their disproportion with 
circumstances, or their disagreement with 
facts." Just as Charles Lamb humanizes a 
brutal jest by turning it against himself, so 
Sir Walter Scott gives amusing emphasis to a 
lie by directing it against his own personality <> 



178 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

His description of himself in his journal as a 
" pebble-hearted cur," the occasion being his 
parting with the emotional Madame Mirbel, is 
truly humorous, because of its remoteness from 
the truth. There are plenty of men who could 
have risked using the phrase without exciting 
in us that sudden sense of incongruity which 
is a legitimate source of laughter. A delight- 
ful instance of effrontery, which shows both 
spirit and invention, is the story told by Sir 
Francis Doyle of the highwayman who, having 
attacked and robbed Lord Derby and his 
friend Mr. GrenviUe, said to them with re- 
proachful candor, " What scoundrels you must 
be to fire at gentlemen who risk their lives 
upon the road ! " As for the wit that lies in 
playful misstatements and exaggerations, we 
must search for it in the riotous humor of 
Lamb's letters, where the true and the false 
are often so inextricably commingled that it is 
a hopeless task to separate facts from fancies. 
" I shall certainly go to the naughty man for 
fibbing," writes Lamb, with soft laughter; and 
the devout apprehension may have been justly 
shared by Edward Fitzgerald, when he de- 
scribes the parish church at Woodbridge as 



WIT AND HUMOR. 179 

being so clamp that the fungi grew in great 
numbers about the communion table. 

A keen sense of the absurd is so little rel- 
ished by those who have it not that it is too 
often considered solely as a weapon of offense, 
and not as a shield against the countless ills 
that come to man through lack of sanity and 
judgment. There is a well-defined impression 
in the world that the satirist, like the devil, 
roams abroad, seeking whom he may devour, 
and generally devouring the best ; whereas his 
position is often that of the besieged, who 
defends himself with the sharpest weapons at 
his command against a host of invading evils. 
There are many things in life so radically un- 
wholesome that it is not safe to approach them 
save with laughter as a disinfectant ; and when 
people cannot laugh, the moral atmosphere 
grows stagnant, and nothing is too morbid, too 
preposterous, or too mischievous to meet with 
sympathy and solemn assurances of good will. 
This is why a sense of the ridiculous has been 
justly called the guardian of our minor morals, 
rendering men in some measure dependent 
upon the judgments of their associates, and 
laying the basis of that decorum and propriety 



180 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

of conduct which is a necessary condition of 
human life, and upon which is founded the 
great charm of intercourse between equals. 
From what pitfalls of vanity and self-assurance 
have we been saved by this ever-watchful pres- 
ence ! Into what abysmal follies have we 
fallen when she withholds her restraining 
hand ! Shelley's letters are perhaps the 
strongest argument in behalf of healthy hu- 
mor that literature has yet offered to the 
world. Only a man burdened with an "in- 
vincible repugnance to the comic " could have 
gravely penned a sentence like this : " Cer- 
tainly a saint may be amiable, — she may be 
so ; but then she does not understand, — has 
neglected to investigate the religion which re- 
tiring, modest prejudice leads her to profess." 
Only a man afflicted with what Mr. Arnold 
mildly calls an " inhuman " lack of humor 
could have written thus to a female friend: 
"The French language you already know; 
and, if the great name of Rousseau did not 
redeem it, it would have been perhaps as well 
that you had remained ignorant of it." Our 
natural pleasure at this verdict may be agree- 
ably heightened by placing alongside of it 



WIT AND HUMOR. 181 

Madame de Stael's moderate statement, " Con- 
versation, like talent, exists only in France." 
And such robust expressions of opinion give 
us our clearest insight into at least one of the 
dangers from which a sense of the ridiculous 
rescues its fortunate possessor. 

AVhen all has been said, however, we must 
admit that edged tools are dangerous things to 
handle, and not infrequently do much hurt. 
"The art of being humorous in an agreeable 
way" is as difficult in our day as in the days 
of Marcus Aurelius, and a disagreeable exer- 
cise of this noble gift is as unwelcome now as 
then. " Levity has as many tricks as the kit- 
ten," says Leigh Hunt, who was quite capable 
of illustrating and proving the truth of his as- 
sertion, and whose scratching at times closely 
resembled the less playful manifestations of a 
full-grown cat. Wit is the salt of conversation, 
not the food, and few things in the world are 
more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards 
life. " Je goute ceux qui sont raisonnables, et 
me divertis des extra vagants," says Uranie, in 
" La Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes ; " and 
even these w r ords seem to tolerant ears to savor 
unduly of arrogance. The best use we can make 



182 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

of humor is, not to divert ourselves with, but 
to defend ourselves against, the folly of fools ; 
for much of the world's misery is entailed upon 
her by her eminently well-meaning and foolish 
children. There is no finer proof of Miss 
Austen's matured genius than the gradual 
mellowing of her humor, from the deliberate 
pleasure affected by Elizabeth Bennet and her 
father in the foibles of their fellow-creatures to 
the amused sympathy betrayed in every page 
of " Emma " and " Persuasion." Not even the 
charm and brilliance of " Pride and Prejudice " 
can altogether reconcile us to a heroine who, 
like Uranie, diverts herself with the failings of 
mankind. What a gap between Mr. Bennet's 
cynical praise of his son-in-law, Wickham, — 
which, under the circumstances, is a little re- 
volting, — and Mr. Knightley's manly reproof 
to Emma, whose youthful gayety beguiles her 
into an unkind jest. While we talk much of 
Miss Austen's merciless laughter, let us remem- 
ber always that the finest and bravest defense 
of harmless folly against insolent wit is embod- 
ied in this earnest remonstrance from the lips 
of a lover who is courageous enough to speak 
plain truths, with no suspicion of priggishness 
to mar their wholesome flavor. 



WIT AND HUMOR. 183 

It is difficult, at any time, to deprive wit 
of its social or political surroundings ; it is 
impossible to drive it back to those deeper, 
simpler sources whence hurnor springs un- 
veiled. " Hudibras," for example, is witty; 
" Don Quixote " is humorous. Sheridan is 
witty ; Goldsmith is humorous. To turn from 
the sparkling scenes where the Rivals play their 
mimic parts to the quiet fireside where the 
Vicar and Farmer Flamborough sit sipping 
their gooseberry wine is to reenter life, and to 
feel human hearts beating against our own. 
How delicate the touch which puts everything 
before us with a certain gentle, loving malice, 
winning us to laughter, without for a moment 
alienating our sympathies from the right. 
Hazlitt claims for the wicked and witty come- 
dies of the Restoration that it is their privilege 
to allay our scruples and banish our just re- 
grets ; but when Goldsmith brings the profli- 
gate squire and his female associates into the 
Vicar's innocent household, the scene is one 
of pure and incomparable hiunor, which never- 
theless leaves us more than ever in love with 
the simple goodness which is so readily de- 
ceived. Mr. Thornhill utters a questionable 



184 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

sentiment. The two fine ladies, who have been 
striving hard to play their parts, and only let- 
ting slip occasional oaths, affect great displea- 
sure at his laxness, and at once begin a very dis- 
creet and serious dialogue upon virtue. " In this 
my wife, the chaplain, and I soon joined ; and 
the squire himself was at last brought to con- 
fess a sense of sorrow for his former excesses. 
We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and 
of the sunshine of the mind unpolluted with 
guilt. I was so well pleased that my little 
ones were kept up beyond the usual time, to 
be edified by so much good conversation. Mr. 
Thornhill even went beyond me, and demanded 
if I had any objection to giving prayers. I 
joyfully embraced the proposal ; and in this 
manner the night was passed in a most com- 
fortable way, till at length the company began 
to think of returning." What a picture it is ! 
What an admirably humorous situation ! 
What easy tolerance in the treatment ! We 
laugh, but even in our laughter we know that 
not for the space of a passing breath does 
Goldsmith yield his own sympathy, or divert 
ours, away from the just cause of innocence 
and truth. 



WIT AND HUMOR. 185 

If men of real wit have been more numer- 
ous in the world than men of real humor, it is 
because discernment and lenity, mirth and 
conciliation, are qualities which do not blend 
easily with the natural asperity of our race. 
Humor has been somewhat daringly defined as 
" a sympathy for the seamy side of things." 
It does not hover on the borders of the light 
and trifling ; it does not linger in that keen 
and courtly atmosphere which is the chosen 
playground of wit ; but diffusing itself subtly 
throughout all nature, reveals to us life, — life 
which we love to consider and to judge from 
some pet standpoint of our own, but which is so 
big and wonderful, and good and bad, and fine 
and terrible, that our little peaks of observa- 
tion command only a glimpse of the mysteries 
we are so ready and willing to solve. Thus, the 
degree of wit embodied in an old story is a mat- 
ter of much dispute and of scant importance ; 
but wdien we read that Queen Elizabeth, in her 
last illness, turned wearily away from matters 
of state, " yet delighted to hear some of the 
c Hundred Merry Tales,' and to such was very 
attentive," we feel we have been lifted into 
the regions of humor, and by its sudden light 



186 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

we recognize, not the dubious merriment of the 
tales, but the sick and world-worn spirit seek- 
ing a transient relief from fretful care and 
poisonous recollections. So, too, when Sheri- 
dan said of Mr. Dundas that he resorted to 
his memory for his jests, and to his imagina- 
tion for his facts, the great wit, after the 
fashion of wits, expressed a limited truth. It 
was a delightful statement so far as it went, 
but it went no further than Mr. Dundas, with 
just the possibility of a second application. 
When Voltaire sighed, " Nothing is so disa- 
greeable as to be obscurely hanged," he gave 
utterance to a national sentiment, which is not 
in the least witty, but profoundly humorous, 
revealing with charming distinctness a French- 
man's innate aversion to all dull and common- 
place surroundings. Dying is not with him, 
as with an Englishman, a strictly " private af- 
fair ; " it is the last act of life's brilliant play, 
which is expected to throw no discredit upon 
the sparkling scenes it closes. 

The breadth of atmosphere which humor 
requires for its development, the saneness and 
sympathy of its revelations, are admirably 
described by one of the most penetrating and 



WIT AND HUMOR. 187 

least humorous of French critics, M. Edmond 
Scherer, whose words are all the more grateful 
and valuable to us when they refer, not to his 
own countrymen, but to those robust English 
humorists whom it is our present pleasure to 
ignore. M. Scherer, it is true, finds much 
fault, and reasonable fault ever, with these 
stout-hearted, strong-handed veterans. They 
are not always decorous. They are not always 
sincere. They are wont to play with their 
subjects. They are too eager to amuse them- 
selves and other people. It is easy to make 
out a list of their derelictions. " Yet this does 
not prevent the temperament of the humorist 
from being, on the whole, the happiest that a 
man can bring with him into this world, nor 
his point of view from being the fairest from 
which the world can be judged. The satirist 
grows wroth ; the cynic banters ; the humorist 
laughs and sympathizes by turns. . . . He has 
neither the fault of the pessimist, who refers 
everything to a purely personal conception, 
and is angry with reality for not being such 
as he conceives it ; nor that of the optimist, 
who shuts his eyes to everything missing on 
the real earth, that he may comply with the 



188 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

demands of his heart and of his reason. The 
humorist feels the imperfections of reality, 
and resigns himself to them with good temper, 
knowing that his own satisfaction is not the 
rule of tilings, and that the formula of the 
universe is necessarily larger than the prefer- 
ences of a single one of the accidental beings 
of whom the universe is composed. He is be- 
yond doubt the true philosopher." 

This is a broad statement ; yet to endure 
life smilingly is no ignoble task ; and if the 
humors of mankind are inseparably blended 
with all their impulses and actions, it is worth 
while to consider bravely the value of quali- 
ties so subtle and far-reaching in their influ- 
ences. Steele, as we know, dressed the invad- 
ing bailiffs in liveries, and amazed his guests 
by the number and elegance of his retainers. 
Sydney Smith fastened antlers on his sheep, 
for the gratification of a lady who thought he 
ought to have deer in his park. Such elabo- 
rate jests, born of invincible gayety and high 
spirits, seem childish to our present adult 
seriousness ; and we are too impatient to un- 
derstand that they represent an attitude, and 
a very healthy attitude, towards life. The 



WIT AND HUMOR. 189 

iniquity of Steele's career lay in his repeatedly 
running into debt, not in the admirable temper 
with which he met the consequences of that 
debt when they were forced upon him ; and 
if the censorious are disposed to believe that 
a less happy disposition would have avoided 
these consequences, let them consider the ca- 
reers of poor Richard Savage and other mis- 
anthropic prodigals. As for Sydney Smith, 
he followed Burton's excellent counsel, " Go 
on then merrily to heaven ; " and his path was 
none the less straight because it was smoothed 
by laughter. That which must be borne had 
best be borne cheerfidly, and sometimes a 
single telling stroke of wit, a single word rich 
in manly humor, reveals to us that true cour- 
age, that fine philosophy, which endures and 
even tolerates the vicissitudes of fortune, 
without for a moment relinquishing its honest 
hold upon the right. Mr. Lang has told us 
such a little story of the verger in a Saxon 
town who was wont to show visitors a silver 
mouse, which had been offered by the women 
to the Blessed Virgin that she might rid the 
town of mice. A Prussian officer, with that 
prompt brutality which loves to offend religious 



190 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

sentiment it does not share, asked jeeringly, 
" Are you such fools as to believe that the 
creatures went away because a silver mouse 
was dedicated?" " Ah, no," replied the ver- 
ger, "or long ago we should have offered a 
silver Prussian." 

It is the often-expressed opinion of Leigh 
Hunt that although wit and humor may be 
found in perfection apart from each other, yet 
their best work is shared in common. Wit 
separated from humor is but an element of 
sport ; " a laughing jade," with petulant 
whims and fancies, which runs away with our 
discretion, confuses our wisdom, and mocks at 
holy charity ; yet adds greatly, withal, to the 
buoyancy and popularity of life. It makes 
gentlefolk laugh, — a difficult task, says Mo- 
liere ; it scatters our faculties, and " bears 
them off deridingly into pastime." It is a 
fire-gleam in our dull world, a gift of the gods, 
who love to provide weapons for the amuse- 
ment and discomfiture of mankind. But hu- 
mor stands on common soil, and breathes our 
common air. The kindly contagion of its 
mirth lifts our hearts from their personal ap- 
prehension of life's grievances, and links us 



WIT AND HUMOR. 191 

together in a bond of mutual tears and laugh- 
ter. If it be powerless to mould existence, or 
even explain it to our satisfaction, it can give 
us at least some basis for philosophy, some 
scope for sympathy, and sanity, and endurance. 
" The perceptions of the contrasts of human 
destiny," says M. Scherer, " by a man who 
does not sever himself from humanity, but 
who takes his own shortcomings and those of 
his dear fellow-creatures cheerfully, — this is 
the essence of humor." 



LETTERS. 

It is one of the current complaints of to-day 
that the art of letter-writing, as our great- 
grandfathers and our great-great-grandfathers 
knew it, has been utterly and irrevocably lost. 
Railways, which bring together easily and often 
people who used to spend the greater portion 
of their lives apart ; cheap postage, which re- 
lieves a man from any serious responsibility for 
what he writes, — the most insignificant scrawl 
seems worth the stamp he puts on it ; the hur- 
ried, restless pace at which we live, each day 
filled to the brim with things which are hardly 
so important as we think them, and which 
have cost us the old rich hours of leisurely 
thought and inaction, — these are the forces 
which have conspired to destroy the letter, and 
to crowd into its place that usurping and un- 
profitable little upstart called the note. " The 
art of note-writing," says Mr. Bagehot, " may 
become classical ; it is for the present age to 



LETTERS. 193 

provide models for that sort of composition ; 
but letters have perished. In the last century, 
cultivated people who sat down to write took 
pains to have something to say, and took pains 
to say it. The correspondence of to-day is 
like a series of telegrams with amplified head- 
ings. There is not more than one idea, and 
that idea soon comes and is soon over. The 
best correspondence of the past is rather like 
a good light article, in which the points are 
studiously made ; in which the effort to make 
them is studiously concealed ; in which a series 
of selected circumstances is set forth ; in which 
you feel, but are not told, that the principle of 
the writer's selection was to make his composi- 
tion pleasant." 

It is difficult not to agree with Mr. Bagehot 
and other critics who have uttered similar 
lamentations. The letter which resembled a 
good light article has indeed disappeared from 
our midst, and I am not sure that many dry 
eyes have not witnessed its departure. Light 
articles are now provided for us in such gen- 
erous measure by our magazines that we have 
scant need to exact them from our friends. In 
fact, we should have no time to read them, if 



194 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

they were written. A more serious loss is the 
total absence of any minute information or 
gossip upon current topics in the mass of 
modern correspondence. The letter which is 
so useful to historians, which shows us, and 
shows us as nothing else can ever do, the ordi- 
nary, every-day life of prominent men and 
women, this letter has also disappeared, and 
there is nothing to take its place. We can 
reconstruct the England, or at least the Lon- 
don of George II. and George III. from the 
pages of Horace Walpole. Who is there 
likely to hand down in this fashion to a com- 
ing generation the England of Queen Victoria? 
Neither does the fact of Walpole's being by 
no means a bigot in the matter of truth-telling 
interfere with his real value. He lies con- 
sciously and with a set purpose here and there ; 
he is unconsciously and even inevitably vera- 
cious in the main. There are some points, 
observes Mr. Bagehot, on which almost every- 
body's letters are true. " The delineation of 
a recurring and familiar life is beyond the 
reach of a fraudulent fancy. Horace Walpole 
was not a very scrupulous narrator, yet it was 
too much trouble, even for him, to tell lies 



LETTERS. 195 

on many things. His stories and conspic- 
uous scandals are no doubt often unfounded ; 
but there is a gentle undercurrent of daily 
unremarkable life and manners which he 
evidently assumed as a datum for his histor- 
ical imagination." 

We may be quite sure, for example, on his 
testimony, that people of fashion went to 
Eanelagh two hours after the music was over, 
because it was thought vulgar to go earlier; 
that Lord Derby's cook gave him warning, 
rather than dress suppers at three o'clock in 
the morning; that when a masked ball was 
given by eighteen young noblemen at Soho, 
the mob in the street stopped the fine coaches, 
held up torch.es to the windows, and demanded 
to have the masks pulled off and put on at 
their pleasure, "but all with extreme good- 
humor and civility ; " that he, Horace Wal- 
pole, one night at Vauxhall, helped Lady 
Caroline Petersham to mince seven chickens 
in a china dish, which chickens " Lady Caro- 
line stewed over a lamp, with three pats of 
butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rat- 
tling and laughing, and we every minute ex- 
pecting to have the dish fly about our ears ; " 



196 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

that at the funeral of George II., the Duke of 
Newcastle — that curious burlesque of an Eng- 
lish nobleman — stood on the train of the 
butcher Duke of Cumberland to avoid the chill 
of the marble. If we think these things are 
not worth knowing, we had better not read 
Walpole' s letters, for these are the things 
which he delights in telling us. Macaulay 
thought these things were not worth knowing, 
and he has accordingly branded Walpole as a 
superficial observer, a vain and shallow world- 
ling. How, he wonders, can we listen seriously 
to a man who haunted auctions ; who collected 
bricabrac ; who sat up all night playing cards 
with fine, frivolous ladies ; who liked being 
a fashionable gentleman, and had no proper 
pride in belonging to the august assemblage 
of authors ; and who, most deadly crime of all, 
lived face to face with the great Whig leaders 
of the day, and was not in the least impressed 
by the magnitude of the distinction thus con- 
ferred on him. But, after all, we cannot, every 
one of us, be built upon the same solemn and 
righteous lines. It is not even granted to 
every one to be a fervent and consistent Whig. 
Horace Walpole, you see, was Horace Wal- 



LETTERS. 197 

pole, and not Thomas Babington Macaulay: 
therefore Macaulay despised him, and called 
on all his readers to despise him too. We can 
only have recourse to Mr. Lang's philosophy : 
" 'T is a wide world, my masters ; there is room 
for both." Walpole is the prince of letter- 
writers, because writing letters was the inspi- 
ration, the ruling passion of his life, and he 
was preeminently qualified for the task. It 
has been well said that had some evil chance 
wrecked him, like Robinson Crusoe, upon a 
desert island, he would have gone on writing 
letters just the same, and waited for a ship to 
carry them away. This is a pleasant conceit, 
because the spectacle of Horace Walpole on a 
desert island is one which captivates the idle 
fancy. Think of his little airs and graces, his 
courtly affectations, his fine clothes and frip- 
pery, his dainty epicureanism, his sense of 
good comradeship, all thrown away upon a 
desert island, and upon the society of a parrot 
and a goat. What malicious tales he would 
have been forced to invent about the parrot ! 
It is best not to believe evil of any one upon 
Walpole's word, especially not of any one who 
had ever attacked Sir Robert's ministry ; for 



198 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

Horace's filial piety took the very exclusive 
form of undying enmity to all his father's po- 
litical opponents. But when we have passed 
over and tried to forget all that is spiteful and 
caustic and coarse in these celebrated letters, 
there is a great deal left, a great deal that is 
not even the current gossip of the day. He 
goes to Paris in 1765, and finds that laughing 
is out of fashion in that once gay capital. 
" Good folks ! " he cries, " they have no time 
to laugh. There are God and the king to be 
pulled down first, and men and women, one 
and all, are devoutly employed in the demoli- 
tion. They think me quite profane for having 
my belief left." A few years later, Walpole 
sees clearly that French politics must end in 
" despotism, a civil war, or assassination." 
The age is not, he says, as he once thought, 
an age of abortion ; but rather " an age of 
seeds which are to produce strange crops here- 
after." Surely, even Macaulay might allow 
that these are the words of a thinker, of a 
prophet, perhaps, standing unheeded in the 
market-place. 

Granted, then, that the light-article letter, 
and the letter which gives us material with 



LETTERS. 199 

which to fill up the gaps and crannies of his- 
tory, which holds the life of the past embalmed 
in its faded pages, have disappeared, perhaps 
forever. There is another letter which has not 
disappeared, which never can disappear as long 
as man stays man and woman, woman, — the 
letter which reveals to us the personality of 
the writer ; which is dear and valuable to us 
because in it his hand stretches out frankly 
from the past, and draws us to his side. It 
may be long or short, carefully or carelessly 
written, full of useful information or full of 
idle nonsense. We do not stop to ask. It is 
enough for us to know from whom it came. 
And the finest type of such a letter may surely 
be found in the well-loved correspondence of 
Charles Lamb. If we eliminated from his 
pages all critical matter, all those shrewd and 
admirable verdicts upon prose and verse ; if 
we cut out ruthlessly such scraps of news 
as they occasionally convey ; if we banished 
all references to celebrated people, from the 
" obnoxious squeak " of Shelley's voice to the 
generous sympathy expressed for Napoleon, we 
should still have left — the writer himself, 
which is all that we desire. We should still 



200 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

have the record of that harmless and patient, 
that brave and sorely tried life. We should 
still see infinite mirth and infinite pathos inter- 
woven upon every page. We should catch the 
echo of that clear, kind laughter which never 
hardens into scorn. Lamb laughs at so many 
people, and never once wrongs any one. . We 
should see the flashes of a wit which carries no 
venom in its sting. We should feel that atmos- 
phere of wonderful, whimsical humor illumi- 
nating all the trivial details of existence. We 
should recognize in the turning of every sen- 
tence, the conscious choice of every word, the 
fine and distinctive qualities of a genius that 
has no parallel. 

It matters little at what page we read. Here 
is the sad story of Henry Robinson's waistcoat, 
which Mary Lamb tried to bring over from 
France, but which was seized at the Custom 
House, " for the use of the king," says 
Charles dryly. " He will probably appear in it 
ai^the next levee." Here is the never-to-be- 
forgotten tea-party at Miss Benjay's, where 
that tenth-rate little upstart of a woman — 
type of a genus that survives to-day — alter- 
nately patronized and snubbed her guest ; 



LETTERS. 201 

flinging at him her pitiful scraps of infor- 
mation, marveling that he did not under- 
stand French, insulting him when he ventured 
an opinion upon poetry, — " seeing that it was 
my own trade in a manner," — imparting to 
him Hannah More's valuable dogmas on edu- 
cation, feeding him scantily with macaroons, 
and sending him home, — not angry as he had 
a right to be, as any other man would have 
been in his place, only infinitely amused. And 
then some people say that a keen sense of the 
ridiculous is not a kindly sentiment ! It is, we 
know it is, when we read the letter to Cole- 
ridge in which Lamb tells how he went to con- 
dole with poor Joseph Cottle on the death of 
his brother • Amos, and how, as the readiest 
comfort he could offer, he swiftly introduced 
into his conversation Joseph's epic poem, 
"Alfred," luring the mourner gently from his 
grief by arousing his poetic vanity. The dear, 
good, stupid Cottle, brightening visibly under 
such soothing treatment, fixed upon his visitor 
a benevolent gaze, and prepared himself for 
melancholy enjoyment. After a while the 
name of Alswitha, Alfred's queen, was slipped 
adroitly into the discourse. " At that mo- 



202 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

ment," says Lamb, " I could perceive that 
Cottle had forgot his brother was so lately be- 
come a blessed spirit. In the language of 
mathematicians, the author was as nine, the 
brother as one. I felt my cue, and strong pity 
stirring at the root, I went to work." So the 
little comedy proceeds, until it reaches its cli- 
max when George Dyer, to whom all poems 
were good poems, remarks that the dead Amos 
was estimable both for his head and heart, and 
would have made a fine poet if he had lived. 
" To this," says Lamb, " Joseph fully assented, 
but could not help adding that he always 
thought the qualities of his brother's heart ex- 
ceeded those of his head. I believe his brother, 
when living, had formed precisely the same 
idea of him ; and I apprehend the world will 
assent to both judgments." Now if we will but 
try to picture to ourselves how Carlyle would 
have behaved to poor Miss Ben jay, how Wal- 
pole would have sneered at Joseph Cottle, w r e 
will understand better the harmless, the al- 
most loving nature of Charles Lamb's raillery, 
which we can enjoy so frankly because it gave 
no pain. 

As for the well-known fact that Lamb's let- 



LETTERS. 203 

ters reflect nothing of the political tumult, the 
stirring warfare, amid which he lived, it is 
interesting to place by their side the contem- 
porary letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, the first 
Earl of Minto, a correspondence the princi- 
pal charm of which is the revelation it makes 
of a nature so fine and brave, so upright and 
honorable, so wise and strong and good, that 
we can best understand the secret of England's 
greatness when we know she has given birth 
to such sons. To study the life of a man who 
played so prominent a part in home and foreign 
politics is to study the history of Europe dur- 
ing those troubled years. In Lord Minto's 
letters we follow breathlessly the desperate 
struggle with Napoleon, the ceaseless wran- 
gling of the Allies, the dangerous rebellions in 
Ireland, the grave perplexities of the Indian 
empire ; and besides these all-important topics, 
we have side-lights thrown upon social life. 
We learn, for instance, that Mrs. Crewe, the 
celebrated beauty and toast of the Whigs, 
liked good conversation, and took an interest 
and even a part, writes Sir Gilbert naively to 
his wife, " in all subjects which men would 
naturally talk of when not in woman's com- 



204 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

pany, as politics and literature." We learn 
also — what we half suspected before — that 
Madame de Stael was so greedy of admira- 
tion that she was capable of purchasing " any 
quantity of anybody at any price, and among 
other prices by a traffic of mutual flattery ; " 
and that she was never satisfied unless she 
could have the whole conversation to herself, 
and be the centre of every company. 

Now, it is hardly to be expected that the 
letters of a great statesman and the letters of 
an obscure clerk in the India House should 
reveal precisely the same interests and infor- 
mation, any more than it is to be expected that 
the letters of the statesman — who was, after 
all, a statesman and no more — should equal 
in literary charm and merit the letters of the 
clerk who was in addition an immortal genius. 
But when we think how profoundly England 
was shaken and disturbed by the discords and 
apprehensions of those troubled times, how 
wars and the rumors of wars darkened the 
air, and stirred the blood of country bump- 
kins and placid rural squires, it seems a little 
strange that Lamb, who lived long years in 
the heart of London, and must have heard 



LETTERS. 205 

so much of these things, should have written 
about them so little. He does learn when 
there is a change of ministry, because he hears 
a butcher say something about it in the mar- 
ket-place. He cultivates a frank admiration 
for Napoleon, whom all his countrymen hated 
and feared so madly. He would be glad, he 
says, to stand bareheaded at his table, doing 
honor to him in his fall. And, after the bat- 
tle of Trafalgar, he writes to Hazlitt : " Lord 
Nelson is quiet at last. His ghost only keeps 
a slight fluttering in odes and elegies in news- 
papers, and impromptus which could not be 
got ready before the funeral." 

These characteristic passages and others 
like them are all we hear of public matters 
from Charles Lamb, and few of us would ask 
for more. It is the continual sounding of the 
personal note that makes his pages so dear to 
us ; it is the peculiarly restful character of his 
beloved chit-chat that keeps them so fresh and 
delightful. And while there is but one Lamb, 
there are many letters which have in them 
something of this same personal quality, some- 
thing of this restful charm. The supply can 
never be exhausted, because letter-writing — 



206 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

not light articles now, nor brilliant semi-his- 
toric narratives, but real letter-writing — is 
founded on a need as old and as young as hu- 
manity itself, the need that one human being 
has of another. The craving for sympathy ; 
the natural and healthy egotism which prompts 
us to open our minds to absent friends ; the 
desire we all feel to make known to others 
that which is happening to ourselves; the 
certainty we all feel that others will be pro- 
foundly interested in this revelation ; the 
inextinguishable impulse to " pass on " ex- 
periences either of soul or body, to share with 
some one else that which we are hearing, or 
seeing, or feeling, or suffering, or enjoying, — 
these are the motives which make letter-writ- 
ing essential and inevitable, crowd it into 
the busiest lives, assimilate it with the dullest 
understandings, and fit it into some crevice 
of every one's daily experience. Thus it hap- 
pens that there is a strong family resemblance 
between letters of every age and every country ; 
they really change less than we are pleased 
to think. The Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in one 
of his delightful essays, quotes from a long 
and chatty letter written, about the time that 



LETTERS. 207 

Moses was a little lad, by an Egyptian gentle- 
man named Pambesa to a friend named Ame- 
nemapt, and giving a very lively and minute 
account of the city of Rameses, wlrich Pam- 
besa was then happily visiting for the first 
time. We have all of us had just such let- 
ters from our absent friends, and have read 
them with mingled pleasure, and envy, and ir- 
ritation. Pambesa the traveler is not disposed 
to spare Amenemapt the stay-at-home any de- 
tail of what he is missing. Never was there 
such a city of the gods as this particular town 
of Rameses wiiich Amenemapt was not des- 
tined to see. There might be found the best 
of good living ; vines, and fig-trees, and onion 
beds, and nursery gardens. Stout drinkers 
too were its jovial inhabitants, with a variety 
of strong liquors, sweet syrups richer than 
honey, red wine, and very excellent imported 
beer. Its women were all well dressed, and 
curled their hair enticingly, smoothing it with 
sweet oil. They stood at their doors, hold- 
ing nosegays in their hands, and presenting 
a very alluring appearance to this gay and 
shameless Pambesa, who could hardly make up 
his mind to pass them coldly by. Altogether, 



208 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

Barneses was an exceedingly pleasant town to 
visit, and the Egyptian gentleman was having 
a very jolly time of it, and we, reading his 
correspondence, fall to thinking that human 
nature before the Exodus was uncommonly 
like human nature to-day. This is one of the 
delights of letter-reading, that it reveals to us, 
not only the life of the past, but, better still, 
the people of the past, our brothers and sis- 
ters who, being dead, still live in their written 
pages. For the scholar the interest lies in 
what Pambesa has to tell ; for the rest of us 
the interest lies in Pambesa himself, who, so 
many thousand years ago, drank the bitter 
beer, and stared at the pretty girls standing 
curled and flower-bedecked, with those de- 
mure, faint smiles which centuries cannot alter 
or impair. 

So it continues, as we run swiftly down the 
years, the bulk of correspondence increasing 
enormously at every stage, until we reach such 
monuments of industry as the famous Cecil 
letters, preserved at Hatfield, and comprising 
over thirty thousand documents. It is pleasant 
to feel we need read none of these, and that, 
if we search for character, we may find it in 



e 



LETTERS. 209 

thirty words as well as in thirty thousand rolls 
of musty parchment. We may find it surely 
in that historic note dispatched by Ann, 
Countess of Dorset, to Sir Joseph Williamson, 
Secretary of State under Charles II., who 
wanted her to appoint a courtier as member 
from Appleby. Nothing could well be shorter ; 
nothing could possibly be more significant. 
This is all : — 

Sir, — I have been bullied by an usurper, I have 
been ill-treated by a court, but I won't be dictated 
to by a subject. Your man shall not stand. 
Ann Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery. 

Now if you don't feel you know Ann Dorset 
pretty well after reading those four lines, you 
would n't know her if she left a diary as long- 
as Samuel Pepys's ; and if you don't feel, after 
reading them, that she is worth the knowing, it 
is hopeless for her to try and win your regard. 
Another and still more amusing instance of 
self-revelation may be found in a manuscript 
familiar to many who have visited the Bod- 
leian Library at Oxford. There, among other 
precious treasures, is a collection of notes 
scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and 



210 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

by Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile the 
tedium of Council. They look, for all the 
world, like the notes which school-girls are 
wont to scribble to one another, to beguile the 
tedium of study. On one page, Charles in a 
little careless hand, not unlike a school-girl's, 
writes that he wants to go to Tunbridge, to see 
his sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer charac- 
ters writes back that there is no reason why he 
should not, if he can return in a few days, and 
adds tentatively, " I suppose you will go with 
a light train." Charles, as though glowing 
with conscious rectitude, responds, " I intend 
to take nothing but my night-bag." Claren- 
don, who knows his master's luxurious habits, 
is startled out of all propriety. " Gods ! " he 
writes : " you will not go without forty or 
fifty horse." Then Charles, who seems to 
have been waiting for this point in the dia- 
logue, tranquilly replies in one straggling line 
at the bottom of the page. " I count that part 
of my night-bag." How plainly we can hear 
the royal chuckle which accompanied this gra- 
cious explanation ! How really valuable is 
this scrap of correspondence which shows us 
for a moment Charles Stuart ; not the Charles 



LETTERS. 211 

of Sir Walter's loyal stories, nor the Charles 
of Macaulay's eloquent invectives ; but Charles 
himself, our fellow mortal, and a very human 
character indeed. 

If, as Mr. Bagehot affirms, it is for the pres- 
ent day to provide models which shall make 
the art of note-writing classical, we can begin 
no better than by studying the specimens al- 
ready in our keeping. If we want humor, 
pathos, a whole tale told in half a dozen words, 
we have these things already in every sentence 
of Steele's hasty scrawls to his wife : " Prue, 
Prue, look a little dressed, and be beautiful." 
— And again : " 'T is the glory of a Woman, 
Prue, to be her husband's Friend and Com- 
panion, and not his Sovereign Director." — Or 
" Good-nature, added to that beautiful form 
God has given you, would make an happinesse 
too great for Humane life." — And finally, 
"I am, dear Prue, a little in Drink, but at 
all times, Your Faithful Husband, Richard 
Steele." 

These bare scraps of letters, briefer, many 
of them, than the " scandalous half -sheets" 
which Prue was wont to send in return, give 
us a tolerably clear insight into the precise 



212 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

nature of Steele's domestic happiness. We 
understand, not only the writer, but the recipi- 
ent of such missives, poor petulant Prue, who 
has had scant mercy shown her in Thackeray's 
brilliant pages, but whose own life was not 
passed upon a bed of roses. We are eager 
to catch these swift glimpses of * real people 
through a few careless lines which have 
miraculously escaped destruction; or perhaps 
through a brief aside in an important, but, to 
us, very uninteresting communication ; as, for 
example, when Marlborough reopens a dis- 
patch to say that he has just received word of 
the surprise and defeat of the Dutch general, 
Opdam. " Since I sealed my letter," he writes 
with characteristic dryness, " we have a report 
from Breda that Opdam is beaten. I pray 
God it be not so, for he is very capable of 
having it happen to him." It is difficult not to 
enjoy this, because, if we sat within the shadow 
of Marlborough's tent, we could not hear him 
more distinctly ; and the desire we feel to get 
nearer to the people who interest us, to know 
them as they really were, is, in the main, nat- 
ural and wholesome. Yet there must be some 
limit set to the gratification of this desire, if 



LETTERS. 213 

we are to check the unwarranted publishing 
of private letters which has become the recog- 
nized disgrace of literature. It is hard for us 
to understand just when our curiosity ceases to 
be permissible ; it is harder still for editors to 
understand just when their privileges cease to 
be beneficial. Not many years ago it was pos- 
sible for Mr. Bagehot to say that he took com- 
fort in thinking of Shelley as a poet about 
whom our information was mercifully incom- 
plete. Thanks to Professor Dowden, it is in- 
complete no longer ; but we have scant cause 
to congratulate ourselves on what we have 
gained by his disclosures. Mr. Froude, acting 
up to an heroic theory of friendship, has pil- 
loried Carlyle for the pleasure and the pain of 
gaping generations ; but there are some who 
turn away with averted eyes from the sordid, 
shameful spectacle. Within the last decade 
the reading world welcomed with acclamations 
a volume of letters from the pen of one who 
had made it his especial request that no 
such correspondence should ever be published. 
How many of those who laughed over the 
witty, whimsical, intimate, affectionate out- 
pourings of Thackeray paused to consider 



214 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS, 

that tliey would one and all have remained un- 
written, could their author have foreseen their 
fate. They were not meant for us, they never 
would have reached us, had his known desires 
and prejudices been respected. Many of them 
are delightful, as when he tells with sedate 
humor of his absurd proposal to Macaulay 
that they should change identities at Sir 
George Napier's dinner, so as to confuse and 
baffle a young American woman, the desire of 
whose heart was to meet these two great lions, 
and of Macaulay's disgust at the bare notion 
of jesting with anything so serious as his lit- 
erary reputation. Yet when the recipient of 
these letters yielded to the temptation of pub- 
lishing them, she would have done well to sup- 
press those trivial, colorless, and private com- 
munications which can have no possible value 
or interest to others. An invitation to dinner 
is of some importance the day that it arrives, 
but it loses its vitality when reprinted forty 
years after the dinner is eaten. There is hor- 
ror in the thought that a man of genius can 
never promise himself that grateful privacy 
which is the lot of his happier and less distin- 
guished brothers ; but that after he has died in 



LETTERS. 215 

the least ostentatious manner he knows how, 
the whole wide world is made acquainted with 
his diversions and his digestion, with his fee- 
blest jokes and his most tender confidences. 
The problem of what to give and what to with- 
hold must be solved by editors who, having 
laboriously collected their material, feel a nat- 
ural disposition to use it. When, as occasion- 
ally happens, the editor regards the author 
simply as his prey, he never conceives the de- 
sirability of withholding anything. He is as 
unreserved as a savage, and probably defends 
himself, as did Montaigne when reproached 
for the impropriety of his essays, by saying 
that if people do not like details of that de- 
scription they certainly take great pains to 
read them. 

Among the letters too charming to be lost, 
yet too personal and frankly confiding to be 
read without some twinges of conscience, are 
those of Edward Fitzgerald, the last man in 
all England to have coveted such posthumous 
publicity. They reveal truthfully that kind, 
shy, proud, indolent, indifferent, and intensely 
conservative nature ; a scholar without the 
prick of ambition, a critic with no desire to 



216 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

be judicial, an unwearied mind turned aside 
from healthy and normal currents of activity. 
Yet the indiscreet publishing of a private 
opinion, a harmless bit of criticism such as 
any man has a right to express to a friend, 
drew down upon this least aggressive of authors 
abuse too coarse to be quoted. It is easy to 
say that Browning dishonored himself rather 
than Fitzgerald by the brutality of his lan- 
guage. This is true ; but, nevertheless, it is 
not pleasant to go down to posterity branded 
with Billingsgate by a great poet; and it is 
doubly hard to bear such a weight of vitupera- 
tion because a word said in a letter has been 
ruthlessly given to the world. 

The unhesitating fashion in which women 
reveal themselves to their correspondents 
makes it seem treachery to read their printed 
pages. Those girlish confidences of Jane 
Austen to Cassandra, so frank and gay, so full 
of jokes and laughter, and country gossip, and 
sisterly affection, what a contrast they afford 
to the attitude of unbroken reserve which Miss 
Austen always presented to the world ! Yet 
now the world is free to follow each foolish 
little jest, and to pass judgment on the wit it 



LETTERS. 217 

holds. Those affectionate and not over-wise 
outpourings of Miss Mitford, with their effusive 
terms of endearment ; those dignified and sol- 
emn reflections of Sara Coleridge, humanized 
occasionally by a chance remark about the 
baby, or an inadvertent admission that she has 
gone down twice to supper at an evening party ; 
those keen, combative, brilliant letters of Mrs. 
Carlyle that are so bitter-sweet ; those unre- 
served and purely personal communications of 
Geraldine Jewsbury which have no message 
whatever for the public ; — how much has been 
given us to which we show scant claim ! It is 
true that in the days when the Polite Letter- 
Writer ruled the land, and his baleful influence 
was felt on every side, a great many women 
wrote elaborate missives which nobody now 
wants to read, but which were then more highly 
prized than the gossiping pages we have learned 
to love so well. These sedate blue-stockings 
told neither their own affairs nor their neigh- 
bors' ; but confined themselves to dignified gen- 
eralities, expressed with Johnsonian elegance. 
There was Miss Seward, for example, who at 
times was too ridiculous for even Scott's genial 
forbearance ; yet whose letters won her such a 



218 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

reputation that we find them diligently sought 
for, years after they were penned. Fancy 
admiring groups of men and women listen- 
ing to Miss Seward's celebrated epistles to 
Miss Rogers and Miss Weston, one of which 
begins : — 

" Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia, 
is the regret you express for our separation ! 
Pleasant were the weeks we have recently 
passed together in this ancient and embowered 
mansion. I had strongly felt the silence and 
vacancy of the depriving day on which you 
vanished. How prone are our hearts per- 
versely to quarrel with the friendly coercion 
of employment, at the very instant in which it 
is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of 
unavailing melancholy." 

The letter which opens in this promising 
manner closes, as might be expected, with a 
fervent and glowing apostrophe to the absent 
one: — 

" Virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacred 
are thy delights ! Sophia, thy mind is capable 
of tasting them in all their poignancy. Against 
how many of life's incidents may that capacity 
be considered as a counterpoise." 



LETTERS. 219 

Now, in the last century, when people re- 
ceived letters of this kind, they did not, as we 
might suppose, laugh and tear them up. They 
treasured them sacredly in their desks, and 
read them to their young nieces and nephews, 
and made fair copies of them for less favored 
friends. Yet the same mail-bags which groaned 
under these ponderous compositions were laden 
now and then with Sir Walter's delightful 
pages, all aglow with that diffused spirit of 
healthy enjoyment, that sane and happy know- 
ledge of life, that dauntless and incomparable 
courage. Perhaps they carried some of Cow- 
per's letters, rich mines of pleasure and profit 
for us all, full to the brim of homely pleasant 
details which only leisure can find time to note. 
A man who was even ordinarily busy would 
never have stopped to observe the things which 
Cowper tells us about so charmingly, — the 
bustling candidate kissing all the maids ; the 
hungry beggar who declines to eat vermicelli 
soup ; the young thief who is whipped for steal- 
ing the butcher's iron-work ; the kitchen table 
which is scrubbed into paralysis ; the retinue 
of kittens in the barn ; the foolish old cat who 
must needs pursue a viper crawling in the sun ; 



220 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

and the favorite tabby who ungratefully ran 
away into a ditch, and cost the family four 
shillings before she was recovered. Cowper 
had time to see all these things, had time to 
hear the soft click of Mrs. Unwin's knitting- 
needles, and the hum of the boiling tea-kettle ; 
and he had moreover the faculty of bringing 
all that he saw and heard very vividly before 
our eyes, of interesting us, almost against our 
will, in the petty annals of an uneventful life. 
It is no more possible for important city men, 
heads of banking-houses and hard-working 
members of Parliament, to write letters of this 
kind, than it is possible for them to hold the 
attention of generations, as Gray so easily 
holds it, with a few playful lines of condolence 
on the death of a friend's cat, a few polished 
verses set like jewels in the delicate filigree of 
a sportive and caressing letter. " It would be 
a sensible satisfaction to me," he writes to 
Walpole, " before I testify my sorrow, and the 
sincere part I take in your misfortune, to know 
for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara 
and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima?), or 
rather I knew them both together ; for I can- 
not justly say which was which. Then as to 



LETTERS. 221 

your ' handsome Cat,' the name you distinguish 
her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing 
one's handsome cat is always the cat one loves 
best ; or if one be alive and one dead, it is 
usually the latter which is the handsomer. 
Besides, if the point were never so clear, I 
hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so 
imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the 
survivor. Oh, no ! I would rather seem to 
mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be 
the tabby one that has met with this sad 
accident." 

Labor accomplishes many things in this 
busy, tired world, and receives her full share 
of applause for every nail she drives. But 
leisure writes the letters; leisure aided by 
observation, and sometimes — as in the case 
of Mme. de Sevigne — by that rare faculty of 
receiving and imparting impressions without 
judicial reasoning, by that winning, unconten- 
tious amenity which accepts life as it is, and 
men as they chance to be. There is no rancor 
in the light laugh with which this charming 
Frenchwoman greets the follies and frivolities 
of her day. There is no moral protest in 
her amused survey of that attractive invalid, 



222 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

Mme. de Brissac, who lies in bed so " curled 
and beautifid " that she turns everybody's 
head. " I wish you could have seen," writes 
Mme. de Sevigne to her daughter, "the use 
she made of her sufferings ; of her eyes, of 
her sighs, of her arms, of her hands languish- 
ing on the counterpane, of the situation, and 
the compassion she excited. I was overcome 
with tenderness and admiration as I gazed on 
the performance, which seemed to me so fine. 
My riveted attention must surely have given 
satisfaction ; and bear in mind that it was for 
the Abbe Bayard, for Saint Herens, for Mont- 
jeu and Plancy, that the scene was rehearsed. 
When I remember with what simplicity you 
are ill, you seem to me a mere bungler in 
comparison." 

This is good-natured ridicule, keen but not 
condemnatory, without mercy, yet without 
upbraiding. Sainte-Beuve, who dearly loves 
Mme. de Sevigne, complains with reason that 
she is not even angry at things which ought to 
anger her, and that this gentle tolerance lacks 
humanity when cruelty and wrong-doing call 
for denunciation. Yet who can remember so 
long and tenderly a friend fallen and dis- 



LETTERS. 223 

graced ? Who can extend a helping hand so 
frankly to a fellow mortal ? Who can love so 
devotedly, or sacrifice herself with such cheer- 
ful serenity at the shrine of her deep affec- 
tions ? Her memory comes down to us through 
two centuries, enriched with graceful fancies. 
We know her as one good and gay, gentle and 
witty and wise, who, by virtue of her supreme 
and narrowed genius, wTote letters unsur- 
passed in literature. "Keep my correspon- 
dence," said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 
in the heyday of her youth and pride. " It 
will be as good as Mme. de Sevigne's, forty 
years hence." But four times forty years 
have only served to widen the gulf between 
these two writers, and to place them in parted 
spheres. Their work springs from different 
sources, and is as unlike in inspiration as in 
form. " It is impossible," says Sainte-Beuve, 
" to speak of women without first putting one's 
self in a good humor by the thought of Mme. 
de Sevigne. With us moderns, this process 
takes the place of one of those invocations or 
libations which the ancients were used to offer 
up to the pure source of grace." In the same 
devout spirit I am glad to close my volume 



224 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 

with a few words about this incomparable 
letter-writer, with a little libation poured at her 
shadowy feet, that my last page may leave me 
and — Heaven permitting — my readers in a 
good humor, cheered by the pleasant memories 
which gild a passing hour. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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